"BONIFACIO ALFONSO (San Sebastian, 1934 - 2011)."Untitled", 1989.Oil on canvas.Signed in the lower margin; signed and dated on the back.Size: 46 x 55 cm.Bonifacio's convulsive figuration is expressed in this composition populated by his characteristic biomorphic creatures, freely inspired by his insect collections, and formally related to the works of Arshile Gorky, Matta or Wilfredo Lam.A fan of drawing since childhood, he began his artistic career in 1955, when he abandoned his incipient career as a bullfighter. That year he won first prize in a painting competition in San Sebastián with a cubist-influenced composition, which encouraged him to enter the School of Arts and Crafts, from which he was soon expelled. After various and disparate occupations, he began to work as a draughtsman in an advertising studio. His friendship with the painter Julio García Sanz enabled him to refine the rudiments of his pictorial craft. In 1958 he held his first individual exhibition, which took place at the Ateneo de Guipúzcoa in San Sebastián. After a short experience in Paris, where he met Mompó, Cuixart and Saura, among others, he settled in Bilbao, where he came into contact with the Grises gallery, a space where the artists of El Paso usually exhibited in the Biscayan capital, and where he presented several solo exhibitions in the second half of the 1960s. Encouraged by Fernando Zobel, in 1968 he decided to move to Cuenca, where he established a close professional relationship with Antonio Lorenzo, who introduced him to the techniques of engraving. In 1970 he signed a contract with the Juana Mordó gallery, to which he remained linked until the early 1990s. During the 1970s his painting became richer; without renouncing the graphic value of drawing, he reinforced the intense emotional charge that emerges from his works by paying greater attention to the chromatic treatment of his compositions, more evident in the figures than in the backgrounds. After a brief period of greater variegation in his work, which coincided with prolonged stays in Mexico, in 1989, the year he moved to Madrid, he was commissioned to design twenty-six stained glass windows for Cuenca Cathedral, in a project in which Gerardo Rueda and Gustavo Torner, among others, were also invited to participate. With more than thirty original editions, the quality and originality of his production earned him the National Engraving Prize, awarded by the Calcografía Nacional in 1993.