Manolo Valdés (b. March 8, 1942, Valencia, Spain) rebuilds canonical images from art history at monumental scale, stripping a single recognizable motif, an Infanta's collar, a Roman bust's profile, down to bold, simplified form and reconstructing it in burlap, scored wood, or weathered bronze until the surface itself, cracked, layered, or coarse, becomes as much the subject as the borrowed image.

Valdés enrolled at the San Carlos School of Fine Arts in Valencia in 1957 but left after two years, having already held his first solo exhibition at the Nebli Gallery in Madrid in 1962. In 1964, with Rafael Solbes and Juan Antonio Toledo, he co-founded Equipo Crónica, a collective that broke with the dominant Art Informel to develop a pop-inflected, narrative style used as direct political and social critique under the Franco dictatorship; Toledo left within the first year, but Valdés and Solbes continued collaborating, jointly signing their work, until Solbes's death in 1981.