Two spaces: Cuenca and the Usa. A new synthesis.
On one hand, thanks to his friendship with Fernando Zóbel, Sempere gets to know Cuenca, site where a “concentration” of painters was appearing: Fernando Zóbel and Sempere themselves, Gustavo Torner, Gerardo Rueda, Millares, Guerrero…they all had, from those years on, a house, in the old part of the city, close to the cathedral, were they spent some seasons in the quiet and timeless atmosphere, that the city provided.
Apart from this, a project of a Museum of Contemporary Art in the Hanging Houses, provoked an activity almost characteristic to a “generation of painters”, whose common objective was to promote abstract art, still ignored and misunderstood.
“Cu” is what he used to call Cuenca- And his trips through Castile clearly influenced his painting:
My trips to Cuenca, getting to know her landscapes, also influenced me
Form, Movement, Communication. E. Sempere. “Contemporary Art and Society”. Ed. San Esteba. Salamanca.
On the other hand and at the same time: the scholarship given by the Ford Foundation in 1963, allowed Sempere to travel during 1964 all around the USA, and to get to know the painting and the “New World Shapes”. This fact brought new elements and a bigger theoretical and practical freedom to his paintings; it gave him an impulse already non-stopping both in his individual creative process and the recognition that, as a painter, he was socially acquiring. His work-line is made more specific, the bridge between the European kinetic art and the visual American tendency.
My trip to the USA gives me the chance to watch the great masters of modern painting, who were very well represented in the museums, such as Mondrian or Kandinsky.
Informations, 22nd October, 1963
Berta Shaefer arranged me an exposition there, which corresponds to all the time of dissolving the rigid schemes.
Sempere. Galería Edurne. 1974.
Then the establishment to kinetic art through the USA came. On the rebound they gave me a little recognition.
Sempere. Gazeta Del Arte, 53. 7.12.1975
Cirilo Popovici in his Sempere’s biography explains the importance of this trip:
«Sempere’s reactions, in front of the American art from this period, are quite significant.
This way, his marvelled astonishment before the North American abstracts (Pollock, Kline, Rothko, Tobey, etc.) but more than anything before the Pop-Art, from which he was mostly interested in Segal, Oldenburg, Warhol, or Liechtnstein. He meets the great painter J. Albers at Yale University. Strange detail: it was Sempere– when he was working at the Dense René Gallery- who hung the pieces of an exposition that the great painter celebrated there. (It’s easy to understand the surprise and happiness of Albers when Sempere told him). The personal contact with this master -although brief- had to, no doubt, an influence on the young Spanish painter’s mind. It was exactly at this time when he celebrated an exposition at the Berta Shaeffer Gallery.»