Federico Guzmán is linked to a group of Seville-based artists who emerged in the mid-1980s in connection with the gallery La Máquina Española and shook up the Spanish art scene of the time. His oeuvre is diverse in form and he has used a broad range of media, including drawing, painting, sculpture, installation, interventions in the urban space, reprographics, and various printing techniques. His work owes a debt to the approaches pursued by American conceptual artists of the 1970s, an orientation reflected in his tendency to emphasise certain ideas over the physical form of a piece. Much of his output revolves around the notion of communication, but rather than seeking to convey specific concepts, he focuses on observing his own experience of the exchange of ideas and the factors that condition such transactions. This interest has frequently led Guzmán to use electric current and telephone lines in his work, as in the case of Tipografía / Topografía, presented at the Brooke Alexander Gallery in New York in 1990 at his first solo exhibition in the United States. Soon after, in works like Anuncio and La inundación, which he presented at the exhibition El cuarto amarillo (held in Madrid in 1990), he asserted his individual existence by including his own telephone and ID number. In the 1990s Guzmán also investigated the collective production of art within the framework of groups like Agencia de Viajes [‘Travel Agency’], GRATIS (Grupos Recreativos Autónomos Temporales de Interés Social – ‘Temporary Autonomous Recreational Groups of Social Interest’) and Cambalache. Between 1997 and 1999 he lived in Bogotá, where he taught at the University of the Andes. The experience of this new setting allowed him to make the living conditions and everyday environment of Columbia part of his work. In the following decade his interest in nature and social commitment grew progressively stronger as he undertook a series of trips to the Western Sahara. Through multiple references to plant elements, his paintings—in many cases large-format pieces—convey immense vitality and a strong sense of optimism. Later, his work once again became more geometric, immersing the viewer in a more personal, dreamlike world.