Tag Archives: catalan

Flag-dancing-moves-lola-lasurt

Centre Cultural Terrassa
05.09 – 06.10.2019

Obras finalistas

 

17 de septiembre a las 19h acto de entrega del 16º Premio BBVA de Pintura Ricard Camí.

 

El Premio se instituyó en 1988 con el fin de estimular la creación pictórica y de contribuir a la promoción y la proyección de jóvenes valores. A lo largo de los años, se ha ido introduciendo en los círculos culturales, artísticos y docentes, y ha devenido una cita tradicional dentro del panorama artístico catalán y un escaparate de la pintura actual que pretende ser una referencia de tendencias y de propuestas nuevas de la plástica contemporánea en Cataluña.

 

La exposición recoge las obras finalistas de la 16ª edición de un certamen que muestra una presencia rica de lenguajes y de técnicas, una inquietud innovadora de los participantes, un buen nivel cualitativo y una participación de artistas de todo.

 

Esta bienal es también un recuerdo permanente a la figura de Ricard Camino, que fue presidente de Caixa Terrassa y que tuvo siempre una especial sensibilidad por la cultura y el arte, y en particular para la pintura.

 

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The artist proposes an itinerary in which the dialogue that takes place between the works and the spectator becomes fundamental. A dialogue that often moves away from words to give way to admiration, contemplation and interest in understanding the subtle, silent and dreamlike atmosphere that surrounds his universe. Self-presentation takes on new importance from materials and also through the titles of works, as Autoretrat (Self-portrait) or Autoretrat al taller (Self-portrait in the studio).

 

The artistic practice of Jordi Alcaraz transcends the traditional categories of painting, sculpture and drawing to approach the assemblage and installation, reflecting on the notion of volume, language as an idea and the passage of time. According to J. F. Yvars, “the works of art are organisms created from living materials, subjected to the alchemy of the elements and expressive techniques, which impose their verisimilitude over time. They breathe, moan, ring, crack up, and readjust in the required harmony that will sketch out the unfinished symphony of his plastic art”. The combination of materials as diverse as mirrors, books or methacrylate makes the elements interact by learning how to breathe, moan or sound together.

 

The text Plastic, which Joaquim Sala-Sanahuja dedicates to Jordi Alcaraz, focuses his attention on the plastic, on the methacrylate more concretely, and concludes as follows: “For some time the transparent “crystal” plastic has appeared to display a quality that has no name. This quality, somewhere between watery and airy, but in essence rhetorical, has been grudgingly described as something secret that cannot be divulged since its limits are still not known. Experts proclaim it as a shiny but also extremely unctuous material. It can be used for anything. It is the material that substitutes all others. The fact it shines is not a shortcoming. And it is a substitute for everything”.

Lola Lasurt

Barcelona, 1983

Lives and works in Barcelona

 

Lola Lasurt’s artistic activity focuses on painting and video and many times also on collaborative processes that confer a universal projection, to her works of a more personal character.

 

The project about the ‘des-time’ can be understood as the analysis and the questioning of a time period, previous to hers. This is one of the main axis of her work, that frequently uses as a starting point elements from the material and aesthetic culture, that reveal behavioral patterns and ideological parameters of a determined era.  

 

Her pieces revolve around the themes of the memory and the oblivion, the nostalgia and the amnesiac need. Lola Lasurt is interested in the historical individual time and its relationship with the guidelines of the hegemonic culture and the construction of collective symbols.

Alicia Kopf

Girona, 1982

Lives and works in Barcelona

 

 

From the exercise of drawing and writing, Alicia Kopf reflects on apparently individual issues that have become generational concerns.

 

The expressive dimension of her work is related to her studies in Fine Arts and Comparative Literature, studies that allow her to get closer to subjects as diverse as poor housing or the epic of polar exploration from a position that combines both awe and ironic distance.

 

Alicia Kopf’s work arises from a metaphor, which allows her to perform an analytic exercise that will finally lead to different associations. Thus, in her project Articantàrtic, from the appropriation and the reshaping of graphical and narrative documents, Alicia Kopf turns a historical account into a first person narrative concerning resistance, obsession and the idea of conquest.

Hernández Pijuan

Barcelona, 1931-2005

 

 

Joan Hernández Pijuan started painting during the sixties with a style related to expressionism. Nevertheless, during the seventies the empty space started gaining prominence in his paintings such as the geometrical figures. As he mentioned himself, `the space´ became the objective of his work; `I’d say that a constant preoccupation is, and has been finding a space as total protagonist of the canvass. (…) A space as a living element and not as a surface upon which one draws or places himself.´

 

The landscape of his childhood in the town of Folquer have become a pictorial motive in his adult age: Hernández Pijuan resorts to a memory exercise to recreate it synthetically in his painting.

 

The objective of this painter was never to achieve a descriptive or narrative painting, but to emphasize through the monochrome the pictorial technique itself.

Evru / Zush

Barcelona, 2001 (from 1946, Alberto Porta, and from 1968, Zush)

Lives and works in Barcelona

 

 

Alberto Porta adopts the name Zush in 1968 when he consciously initiates the creation of his own world parallel to reality. This world constituted by his artistic work is named “Evrugo Mental State”, which is a State such as a bubble territory.

 

In this state there even exists an alphabet called “asura”, a passport, a flag, ambassadors… His iconography is nourished by images that Evru/Zush has been elaborating from biographic elements: eyes, vital organs, fire, water, etc.

 

From the eighties, Zush incorporates new digital means to his work which boost the interactivity and the relevant role that the spectator assumes. His work aims –according to what he himself has commented in some occasions- to achieve harmony in art, science and mysticism, which would make possible to recover the balance present in childhood.

Alfons Borrell

Barcelona, 1931 – Sabadell, 2020

 

 

Alfons Borrell is one of the most prominent representatives of lyrical abstraction in Catalonia.

 

After attending the studio of Anglada Camarasa and the School of Fine Arts of Sant Jordi in Barcelona, Alfons Borrell began his artistic career in the fifties, within figuration at first. His work evolved into abstract expressionism and, already in the sixties, to the gestural painting.

 

In the mid-seventies he developed the style of its own, detached of any label, characterized by a sober chromatism that  is consciously disassociated from the material informality. In his painting, the color is imposed on the form, from a language that waives any reference, craving and seeking restraint and rigor.

Calella, Barcelona, 1963

Lives and works in Calella, Barcelona

 

Jordi Alcaraz’s work is a reflection on volume, artistic language and time through a lyrical handling of materials. An abstraction that is the result of the battle against limitations of format and conventions.

 

His work is based on the classical tradition of painting and sculpture and alters the meaning of the foundations of a real and recognizable object, to new genesis of meaning and continent.

 

Jordi Alcaraz transgresses surfaces and materials, gives unlikely uses to his pieces and redefines the logic of frames and methacrylate, of stones and plasters, of mirrors and woods, of shadows and metals; changing perceptions and conventional treatments.

 

He has done different bibliophile editions such as “El Viatge a Tokushima”, with text by Joaquim Sala-Sanahuja, or “Diorames”, together with Joan Brossa, Alfons Borrell, Perejaume and Jordi Rosés.

Barcelona, 1952

Lives and works in Barcelona

 

 

Frederic Amat’s artistic career dates all the way back to the early 1970’s. Just after completing his studies in architecture and set design, he went to live in Mexico and later he moved to New York, where he explored hand-made paper as an artistic material. His travels to Brazil, Egypt, Haiti, Morocco and so on has fecundated an oeuvre characterized by constant research. Throughout Amat’s career, he has been diversifying his plastic repertoire, his development going from irregular lines and vibrant colors in his early drawings to the expressionism in his later works.

 

The work of Amat defies a single way of categorization. His open conception of painting led him to integrate a multitude of languages into his artistic practice, including painting, drawing, sculpture, installation art, performance, book illustration, videos, theatre set design and interventions in architectural spaces.

  Barcelona, 1927 – Saint-Paul-de-Vence, 1984

 

Joan Ponç was a primordial painter within the avant-garde scene during the Spanish post-war period. Founder of the magazine “Dau Al Set”, together with Brossa, Cuixart, Arnau Puig, Tàpies and Tharrats, he would remain faithful to the aesthetic principles of the group throughout his long career. After a brief stay in Paris, he lived in Brazil, where he created the group L’Esplai and where he exhibited at the Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo (1954 and 1956). In 1964 he returned to Catalonia, the same year that René Metras Gallery in Barcelona organized a retrospective exhibition. In 1972 the monograph Universo y magia de Joan Ponç de Mordechai Omer was published and in 1978 the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris dedicated him an important solo exhibition. His work has been exhibited in important museums and art centers such as Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid; Artium in Vitoria-Gasteiz; Bonner Kunstverein in Bonn; Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil in Mexico; The National Museum of Art of Romania Bucharest; Fondation Maeght de Saint-Paul-de-Vence, among others. In 2017, Fundació Catalunya La Pedrera in Barcelona presents the exhibition Diàbolo, a new anthological interpretation of the work and the figure of the painter, from the forties to the eighties.

Antoni Muntadas

Barcelona, 1942

Lives and works between Barcelona, New York and Venice.

 

 

Antoni Muntadas’s work has developed from its beginning –early seventies– a constant criticism towards the languages and messages of the media as clear instruments of power.

 

Since the first moment he used the video as useful tool to dissect and make the mechanisms of communications visible, referring to television and the designated `media landscape´. This genuine study and treatment turned him into an early pioneer in the audiovisual artistic field.

 

Likewise, Muntadas has analyzed and questioned the relationships that are established between the public and the private through his video works, photographs and multimedia installations; it’s from the early nineties that he incorporates internet to this list.

 

Also, since the 90s, he initiates new kinds of long-term. In each of these projects a principal concept is developed, which extends through different stages and contexts.

Perejaume

Sant Pol de Mar, 1957

Lives and works in Sant Pol de Mar

 

 

Perejaume started to exhibit his work during the late seventies and since then he has been developing it in parallel, either in visual disciplines or in literary extension.

 

The landscape is a recurring subject analyzed and explored in his work, retaking and reevaluating the presence it has had most of all, in its literary and visual production. Through this approach, his relationship with the landscape is examined from diverse points of view none of which are exempt of irony. Points of view that are shaped through painting, sculpture, photography, installations, video or the intervention on the natural environment itself.

 

For Perejaume, man is part of the landscape, he isn’t an outsider to it and he is yet another agent in its conformation and evolution, as if the geologic time would have been accelerated.

Ràfols Casamada

Barcelona, 1923-2009

 

 

Besides his long pictorial career which has boosted him internationally, Albert Ràfols Casamada has another creative side as a literary poet. It is of no surprise that his multidisciplinary character attracts him to teaching and pedagogy in the world of fine Art.

 

In his painting, modernity’s fragile equilibrium has been developed and maintained: his work, of classical origin, incorporates at the same time the legacy of the avant-gardes.

 

During the early seventies he abandoned figuration to work in the field of abstract painting that would take him, during the eighties and nineties, to develop a more lyrical abstraction. This process would lead to what is his most recognized stage in his artistic career.

 

On the other hand, Ràfols Casamada has had a fundamental role in the renewal of the arts teaching in Spain being the founding member of the Eina School in Barcelona in 1967.

We present Hernández Pijuan 1977-2005, an exhibition dedicated to the 28-year-long close collaboration between Joan Hernández Pijuan and Galeria Joan Prats. The pieces selected correspond to the broad period of 1977-2005, but mostly focusing on the very last years of his career.

 

Although the set of pieces corresponds to a large period of the artist’s production, this exhibition does not have a retrospective character.

 

Galeria Joan Prats will present works on paper (gouache, watercolour, pencil drawing…) and oils on canvas of different sizes, as well as a selection of the archive of the artist – sketches & photographs, thus allowing the discovery of his creative environment and some of his projects or work processes.

 

This exhibition intends to be a tribute to the artist, an expression of gratitude and friendship but also a recognition and showing of a work that is still as contemporary as it was in its beginnings.

 

 

Joan Hernández Pijuan (1931-2005) has been one of the most internationally renowned Catalan artists. He has taken part in exhibitions at prestigious international art centres and has also received several awards, as for example the Premio Nacional de Arte Gráfico, in recognition for his trajectory (2005), the Premi Ciutat de Barcelona of Plastic Arts (2004) and the Premio Nacional de Artes Plásticas (1981).

 

Among his most outstanding exhibitions it could be pointed out his participation at the 51st Venice Biennale (2005); Tornant a un lloc conegut… Hernández Pijuan 1972-2002, at the MACBA, Barcelona (2003), travelling exhibition at the Musée d’art et d’histoire de Neuchâtel, the Konstshalle Malmö and the Galleria d’Arte Moderna de Bologna; Hernández Pijuan-drawings 1972-1999, at the Rupertinum Museum in Salzburg (2000) and Espacios de silencio 1972-1992 at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid (1993), that was also exhibited at the Museo de Monterrey, México.

 

Recently his work has been shown at a retrospective exhibition at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art; at the exhibition Farben der erde, at the Altana Kulturstiftung in Bad Homburg, Germany and at the exhibition La distancia del dibujo, travelling to the Museo de Arte Abstracto Español, Cuenca, the Museu de Montserrat and the Museu d’Art Espanyol Contemporani, Palma de Mallorca.