Along with Paco Molina, José Soto, Gerardo Delgado, José Ramón Sierra, and Juan Suárez, Manuel Salinas was one of a group of Andalusian artists who, in the late 1960s and 1970s, participated in the renewal and internationalisation of contemporary Spanish painting. The work he produced early in his career was figurative, but after a trip to New York, where he discovered Barnett Newman, among others, his painting moved into the territory of abstraction. Building on a strictly geometric foundation, the artist produces free, spontaneous, gesture on an underlying order. In 1980, when he executed the painting by which he is represented in the ”la Caixa” Collection, Pintura, Salinas, in harmony with his time, had reached a turning point: his output became boldly expressionist, with a purely American lineage, and colour as the fundamental element. The agitation and vibration of forms diluted in swift, vigorous brushstrokes nevertheless maintains a solid structure.