Pablo Palazuelo was born in Madrid in 1916. He studied architecture in the city in 1932 and then in Oxford, UK, from 1934 to 1936, before returning to Spain upon the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. Palazuelo began to focus on painting in the 1940s and in 1949 he exhibited his first abstract work in the Salon de Mai, Paris. He remained in Paris for the next twenty years.
Palazuelo had his first solo exhibition at Galerie Maeght in 1955 and featured in the exhibition 'Younger European Painters: A Selection' at the Guggenheim Museum and the Pittsburgh International, 1955. In 1969 he returned to Spain. A major retrospective of his work was held at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid in 1995, and at the Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona in conjunction with the Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao in 2005. Palazuelo received many awards in his lifetime, including the Kandinsky Prize in 1952 and the Medalla de Oro al Mérito en las Bellas Artes, awarded in 1982 by the Spanish Ministry of Culture. Palazuelo died in Madrid in 2007.