José Manuel Broto came to the attention of Spanish art critics in 1976, when he took part in a group show with three other artists at this gallery. The show had a clear coherence, and made a firm statement in favor of the activity of painting. The inheritance of “postpainterly abstraction” and Abstract Expressionism, filtered through the intellectual bias of the French "support-surface” movement, was evident, and Broto and his colleagues were in fact quite firmly opposed to conceptual work, which was then still dominant in Spanish art.

Between the mid ’70s and the decades end the political and