Ceramic Tile Sculpture 1987 Delivery service: Colissimo César Manrique (1919-1992) was born in Arrecife, an island in Lanzarote which is forever marked by his artistic trajectory. After completing his studies at the Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando in Madrid (where he resided from 1945 to 1964), he frequently exhibited his works both in Spain and abroad. In the first half of the 1950s, he devoted himself to non-figurative art and researched the qualities of the material until he made it the essential figure of his compositions. He is thus linked to the Spanish informalist movement of that time. Despite its material and abstract extraction, the plastic imagination of his pictorial production comes from impressions of the volcanic landscape of Lanzarote which the artist transmutes into a species of non-realistic naturalism which does not arise from the copy of the natural, but from its understanding emotional: “I try to be the free hand that forms geology,” he wrote. In 1964, he moved to New York where he exhibited on three occasions, as an individual, at the Catherine Viviano gallery. Direct knowledge of American expressionism, pop art, new sculpture and kinetic art provided him with a fundamental visual culture for his later creative journey. In the mid-sixties, when he moved to Lanzarote, César Manrique promoted on the island a series of artistic projects of a spatial and landscape nature, unprecedented at the time, in which he materialized his plastic and ethical thinking. It is a set of actions and interventions aimed at highlighting the landscape and natural assets of the island, which will configure its new face and its international projection and which are part of the landscape transformation and the adaptation of Lanzarote to the tourism economy. This is how he developed a new set of aesthetic ideas that he called art-nature/nature-art, in which he integrated different artistic manifestations, which he materialized in his landscape works, which constitute a singular example of public art in Spain: Jameos del Agua, Mirador del Río, Jardín de Cactus, Timanfaya, etc. These are fundamentally interventions linked to the tourist industry to which Manrique imbues an economic and social functionalism unprecedented in Spanish artistic culture. He also carries out works of this nature on other islands and outside the Canary Islands – viewpoints, gardens, development of degraded spaces, transformation of the coastline, etc. – in which he maintains his fundamental principles: a respectful dialogue with the environment. natural and between the architectural values of local tradition and modern designs.