COLLECTION / 1945-1989 / Spain / El Hortelano

560 works of art and documentation.

José Alfonso Morera Ortiz (Valencia, 1954-2016), known by his artistic pseudonym El Hortelano, was one of the leading artists of the Movida Madrileña, alongside other names such as Ceesepe, Alberto García-Alix, Pedro Almodovar and Ouka Leele.

El Hortelano is the author of an extensive and varied body of work (painting, book and record covers, graphic work, drawings, comics, posters…) that has been shown in numerous exhibitions and collected in catalogs. Recipient of the Medalla de Oro al Mérito en las Bellas Artes (2009), his work has gone through several periods over the years, evolving from a kind of figurative art described by critics as «distorted» to a period of full-on lyricism in the 1990s. This evolution was thoroughly analyzed in the retrospective held in 2001 at the Centro Conde Duque in Madrid.

Known as the «painter of the Movida», El Hortelano began to participate in group exhibitions and to publish in alternative magazines (Star, Ajoblanco, El Viejo Topo...) at the beginning of the 1970s. At the age of twenty-one he did his military service in Madrid and went to the Rastro flea market to meet Ceesepe and Alberto García-Alix, who had a countercultural comic stall there and had created the Cascorro Factory. A friendship immediately arose between them, and he and Ceesepe rented an apartment together near Puerta de Toledo, which became the meeting point of the Movida.

This was followed by his first solo exhibition in Barcelona— «Moda», at the René Metrás Gallery— and his relationship with artists such as Nazario, Mariscal and Barceló. Then came a life full of travel and stays abroad (New York, Rome, Egypt, Tunisia, Finland, Jordan, India, Nepal...), exhibitions (at the Estampa and Moriaty Galleries) and work on his great series: El manifiesto emocionado, El perdón de los pecados, Pater Noster, Osa mayor, Madre agua and Humano. He was still working on the latter when he was struck by the illness that ended his life in 2016.

Archivo Lafuente’s El Hortelano collection is made up of more than 550 items dating from 1970 to 1990. It is a collection comprised of original works and their corresponding preparatory materials, photographs, publications, storyboards, lithographs, prints, textiles, photolithographs, printing proofs, posters, postcards, autographs and more.

The Lafuente Archive preserves original comics, among them the forty-three that comprise the publication Europa Réquiem?! (Pastanaga, 1978), which in turn includes a series of comics that had previously appeared in magazines such as Star (preparatory drawings, photolithographs and printing proofs are preserved in this collection).

The set of photographs (127 units) covers almost his entire biography, from childhood photos with his family to images of his last years, with portraits of him and his friends signed by Alberto García-Alix or by his former partner, Ouka Leele. The Lafuente Archive also holds the storyboards or graphic scripts of Humanae Vitae (3 notebooks), Urgente (4 originals), and Duplex (5 originals). There are also handwritten scripts: of a concert with Poch (leader of Derribos Arias), and of a film entitled Barabajal with Ouka Leele. Also included is a notebook with about twenty handwritten poems, entitled Kilimanjaro.



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