Manuel Bea Cervera, printmaker, painter, sculptor, and illustrator, was born in Barcelona, Spain on 19 March 1934. His various aliases include Monolo Bea, Manuel Bea, and Manuel Cervera Bea. Cervera briefly attended the Barcelona School of Arts and Crafts and began working in an illustration workshop at the age of fourteen, creating illustrations for various publications. Formal art training began in 1958 when he moved to Zurich and enrolled at the Kunstgebeweschulle. It was there that Cervera was introduced to printmaking.

Cervera participated in his first exhibition at Galeria Haller in Zurich in 1960; two years later he returned to Spain and settled in Castell d’Aro where he would eventually have four studios over a thirty-five-year period of time.

His work was greatly influenced by the German Expressionists, Max Ernst, Jean Dubuffet and Jean Fautrier. By the late 1960s Cervera labeled his art Abstract Figuration, and he expanded his exhibitions to include Germany and Belgium. Among his selected exhibitions were the VII May Salon in Barcelona (1963); the XX Biennial of Sao Paolo; and the International Art Salon, Basel (1970). The retrospective, Manuel Bea: Paintings, Drawings, Objects, was held February 4 - April 9, 1995, at the Cultureel Centrum Hasselt in Belgium. His work is held in the collections of the Spanish Museum of Contemporary Art, Madrid; the Museum des Landes Glarus in Näfels, Switzerland; and the Museums of Contemporary Art in Barcelona, Bilbao, Seville, and Valencia.

Manuel Bea Cervera died in Switzerland in 1997.