Ceramic Tile Sculpture 1987 Delivery service: Colissimo César Manrique (1919-1992) was born in Arrecife, an island in Lanzarote that is forever marked by his artistic career. After completing his studies at the Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando in Madrid (where he lived 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 matter to the point of making it the essential figure in his compositions. In this way, he linked himself to the Spanish informalist movement of that time. Despite its material and abstract extraction, the plastic imagination of his pictorial production comes from the impressions of the volcanic landscape of Lanzarote that the artist transmutes into a kind of non-realistic naturalism that does not arise from the copying of nature, but from its emotional understanding: "I try to be the free hand that forms geology", he would write. In 1964, he moved to New York where he exhibited on three occasions, as an individual, at the Catherine Viviano gallery. His direct knowledge of American expressionism, pop art, new sculpture and kinetic art provided him with a fundamental visual culture for his subsequent creative journey. In the mid-sixties, when he settled in Lanzarote, César Manrique promoted a series of artistic projects of a spatial and landscape nature on the island, unprecedented at the time, in which he materialized his plastic and ethical thinking. This is a set of actions and interventions aimed at highlighting the landscape and natural assets of the island, which will shape its new face and international projection and which are part of the landscape transformation and adaptation of Lanzarote to the tourism economy. In this way, he elaborates a new set of aesthetic ideas that he calls art-nature/nature-art, in which he integrates different artistic manifestations, which he materializes in his landscape works, which constitute a unique example of public art in Spain: Jameos del Agua, Mirador del Río, Jardín de Cactus, Timanfaya, etc. These are fundamentally interventions linked to the tourism industry to which Manrique imprints 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 natural environment and between the architectural values of local tradition and modern designs.