<p>Zavaro was born in Istanbul, Turkey in 1925 of Spanish parents. The death of his father in 1927 prompted the family to move to France. He had but one central idea as a child: to become an artist. Well aware of the material as well as emotional difficulties which are the common lot of an artist, he was tempted to become a professor of drawing and early studied drawing in the public schools of Paris.</p> </p>In 1939, Zavaro left with his family to move to Annecy and started to study sculpture with one of his friends who was a sculptor himself and who instilled in him a basic mastery of the technique. His enthusiasm for sculpture lasted until he realized that his true vocation was to experiment with color and to express himself through pictorial signs. In 1945, he returned to Paris to enroll in the prestigious Ecole Nationale des Beaux-arts and studied painting with N. Untersteller and M. Brianchon. Untersteller taught him rigor and precision while Brianchon was able to show him that painting, far from being a lifeless, rigid transcription of reality, follows the movement and rhythm of life.</p> <p>After winning the prize of the Casa Velasquez in 1950, he left for Spain, discovered the Prado and began his works inspired by Velasquez and Rubens. He permanently returned to France in 1954 and exhibited his work in various salons. In 1963, Zavaro had an entire exhibition devoted to his native Istanbul. He would then abandon the painting of cities and devote himself to the evocation of the elements of a nature stripped of any artifice. Over the years, Zavaro’s painting has progressively moved toward a greater economy of resources; the color has become lighter and sharper, the material of a nearly monastic thinness, the form pure and sharp, while the brushstroke disappears in his flat tints of a homogeneous texture.</p> <p>In 1967, he became professor at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and headed his own studio. Since ’68, Zavaro’s work has been exhibited by major galleries in France, the United States and Japan. His works are held in a number of private and public collections, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art in Mexico City and the Musee d’Art Moderne.</p>