The ZAJ movement, the most groundbreaking and radically new avant-garde group of the last forty years, was founded in Madrid in 1964 and specialised in postcard art, books and concerts. Although it was from the beginning an open movement to which many artists contributed, the founding fathers were Juan Hidalgo, Walter Marchetti and, later, Esther Ferrer. The ZAJ concerts were meant to shock their audiences: they provided music for the eyes as well as for the ears, combining echoes of Dadaism and Futurism with a touch of Zen, and channelling silence as a means of expression. Music and theatre were conflated on the ZAJ stage.

Hidalgo has received a number of prizes and awards including the 1987 Canary Island Award for Fine Arts and Interpretation, the 1989 Gold Medal for Merit in Fine Arts, awarded by the Ministry of Culture and the Gold Medal from the Círculo de Bellas Artes de Madrid in 2001. He has also taken part in a number of major exhibitions, the most noteworthy being the ZAJ Retrospective at the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid in 1996, the De Juan Hidalgo anthology at the CAAM in Las Palmas and La Recova in Santa Cruz de Tenerife in 1997, and the retrospective “En Medio del volcán” touring Mexico and Peru in 2004.

Juan Hidalgo is pure creativity with no dressing: sometimes polished, sometimes fiercely head-on, yet always transgressive.