Born in Tenerife, Rodrigo Moynihan grew up in America and Italy. He studied at the Slade School of Art (1928-1931) and co-founded ‘Objective Abstraction’, a radical artistic group in London in 1934 that rejected geometric abstraction in favour of abstraction inspired by nature. By 1937, his work shifted towards figurative painting and he became involved with the Euston Road School. Moynihan was an Official War Artist in the Second World War and became an Associate of the Royal Academy in 1944. He also taught at the Royal College of Art (1948-1957). He returned to abstract painting in the 1950s, but by the early 1970s, returned to figurative painting including commissioned works and self-portraits.
