Rafael Canogar (Toledo, 1935) is a Spanish painter, one of the main representatives of abstract art in Spain.
Born Rafael García Cano Gómez, he changed his first surname to Canogar, a surname that was legally recognized and that he has passed on to his descendants.
A disciple of Daniel Vázquez Díaz (1948-1953), in his early works he found a way to reach the avant-garde and, very soon, deeply study abstraction.
Initially, he used a sculpture-pictorial technique: with his hands he scratched or squeezed the paste that he made vibrate on flat colored backgrounds.
In 1957 he founded with other artists (A. Saura, M. Millares, Luis Feito and Pablo Serrano), as well as the critic José Ayllón, the Madrid group El Paso.
The third dimension finally provided a solution to the new work, to its second period which, from 1963, gradually returned to the reality of an increasingly narrative complex figuration.
In 1974 he participated together with Wolf Vostell, Edward Kienholz and other artists in Berlin in the activities of ADA - Aktionen der Avantgarde.
In 1975 he abandoned realism and for a period he made eminently abstract works, an analysis of painting, of the support, of the two-dimensionality of painting.
In 1982 he received the National Prize for Plastic Arts.