Tag Archives: painter

Lima, Perú (1992). Lives and Works between London and Madrid.

 

 

 

His work moves between painting, installation and public intervention, his research seeks a horizontal display of critical observations based on extensive documentary work. Daniel de la Barra tells us about the crisis of looking at nature, the representation of the landscape as an extractive process and the points of friction that exist between image, history and modernity. His multidisciplinary work gives us the opportunity to investigate the colonial conflicts that have relegated nature to a subaltern space of exploitation and domination and compose an exercise in countervisuality that reflects, from a global perspective, on the representation of the landscape as an extractive and exercise of power.

 

His work materializes in anti-landscape exercises through socio-environmental violence against neo-extractivism through a political and historical journey, reminiscent of botanical expeditions that reinforce ways of looking at the natural; like a landscape of conquest.

During 2022 he was an artist in residence at the Royal Academy of Spain in Rome (Italy), in addition to presenting his individual exhibitions at the Joan Prats Gallery (Barcelona) where he received the Collezione Taurisano Award for best exhibition, Ginsberg Gallery (Lima) and at the Central Museum of Lima as part of the exhibition of finalists for the XII National Painting Award. He has also exhibited individually this year at Frieze London and has received the grant as a new resident artist at the Delfina Foundation (London) and the Fundació Miró and Casa Velázquez Grant in Madrid for 2023.

 

In 2021 he developed the project “This is not a landscape. Episode II” at Homesession as part of its INVITED program and received the Catalonia Youth Art Award (Sala d’Art Jove) for publishing his book “Real Expedición Botánica” in collaboration with the Lo Pati Contemporary Art Center (Amposta) and La Panera (Lleida). He also did a residency at La Fabrique (French Alliance in Lima, Peru). In 2020 he was selected as a resident artist at Homesession (Barcelona) where he developed his project “This is not a landscape”. He exhibited “Desired Landscapes” at Arts Santa Mónica, “Considerations of the Modern City” at La Bienal de Amposta (Lo Pati Center d’Art) and his project “Subversion: Inhabiting Ruins” at El Born CCM (Barcelona). He did a residency at the Piramidon Center d’art Contemporani during 2019 and carried out several projects such as “Searching for Paititi”, Espai SubSòl, for the Barcelona Gallery Weekend, “Desired Landscapes” Escola de Estiu Walter Benjamin, Portbou or “Pateras Carnaval – Well-being trips” for Luminaria 04, Madrid. In 2018 he received a scholarship at The Nerdrum School (Sweden). He also obtained the La Escocesa (Barcelona) Research Grant in 2018 and 2019, the 2019 Art Jove Award (Sala d’Art Jove), exhibiting at the Sala d’Art Jove. That same year he received the IdeaBorn International Prize and was a finalist for the Ricard Camí Painting Prize (C.C.Terrassa). In Peru, in recent years, he has been a finalist for both the ICPNA National Contemporary Art Award and the National Painting Award (MUCEN), exhibiting at the Central Museum of Lima and the Juan Pardo Hereen Gallery.

 

Badalona, ​​1991

Lives and works in Barcelona

 

Marcel Rubio Juliana expresses himself mainly through drawing and painting, although his approach to creation has, at times, certain similarities with the literary essay.

 

His work processes are usually of a very long duration. He formalizes his aesthetic investigations mainly in large formats, charcoal canvases, epic scenes in oil but also miniatures on glass.

 

Marcel Rubio Juliana’s work is characterized by his interest in classical references: Renaissance painting, sculpture and Italian architecture. He produces an iconography resulting from the natural observation of both human and animal models that runs through all his canvases. Marcel is not afraid to face great themes such as love, death, resurrection, however, elements of everyday life or popular culture can always appear in his paintings.

 

From the allegory, which ironically includes contemporary grotesque representations, in his own words, his work is built around a single purpose: “elevate the spirit.”

Daniel de la Barra

Opening Thursday, 30th June, 5-9pm

Conversation with the artist Daniel de la Barra and the curator Alicia Chillida, Thursday, 30th June, 7pm. Please, confirm assistance at galeria@galeriajoanprats.com

 

Thursday, 28 July, 19h: commented visit by Olivier Collet. Please, confirm assistance at galeria@galeriajoanprats.com

 

As part of Artnou, we present at Galeria Joan Prats the exhibition of Daniel de la Barra Destierro, curated by Alicia Chillida.

 

 

The inhabitants from the Terres de l’Ebre coexist in a threatened territory. Daniel de la Barra first visits the heart of the Ebro Delta, in 2021, as a guest of Centre Lo Pati to accomplish an artistic residence in Balada, next to anthropologist María Faciolince. The project reflects on the reconstruction of the landscape’s narrative, one that keeps on sustaining and perpetuating the industry’s extraction practices. It compounds a register based on images about socio-environmental violence of a political and historical nature with reminiscences to the botanic expeditions that consolidated the ways of seeing the natural as a potential land of conquest. As references, the artist uses the botanic expedition illustrated books, the paintings of traveling artists in Latin America and the Romantic Landscape paintings from XVIII and XIX centuries.

 

The exhibition in Joan Prats Gallery is the result of translating these researches to an art installation that combines diverse medium: painting, sculpture, poetry, music, video, documents… A new ecosystem recreated through the artistic field. The representation arises from a need to give an answer to a complex landscape dominated by political, economic and social forces, that contribute to its (de) structuring. This territory subjugated him then and hasn’t ceased to deepen in his skin, in his most profound places. He has explored his lands and, immersed in them, emerges the fundamental encounter with its people. Prove of this is the tight collaboration with Josep Pinyol, Luís Martinez’s composition and musical interpretation in the Santa Bárbara’s church organ, and the poems recited by Miquel Curto, in Tivenys.

 

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In collaboration with Real Academia de España en Roma, Fundació Sorigué, Lo Pati Centre d’Art Terres de l’Ebre and Sala d’Art Jove in Generalitat de Catalunya.

 

 

Daniel de la Barra. Lima, Perú (1992). Lives and Works in Rome.

 

Daniel de la Barra moves between painting, installation and public intervention, focusing his work on the re-construction of narratives in societies within the homogenization of the public landscape and the hierarchical imposition of powers of domination within the framework of colonial capitalism. He began his studies in 2012 at the Escuela de Arte Contemporáneo Corriente Alterna (Lima, Peru) until 2014, when he moved to Madrid to continue his painting studies.

 

He has carried out artistic residencies at La Escocesa Fabrica de creació, Piramidon Centre d’art Contemporani, Homesession, in Barcelona where he lived 7 years, and The Nerdrum School (Sweden). He has developed several exhibition projects and interventions such as “Pròxima Obertura” at Montjuic Castle, Barcelona, “Esc-Out” at Fabra i Coats Centre d’Art Contemporani, Barcelona, “Ruta de los Indianos – Consideraciones de la Ciudad Moderna,” at Lo Pati within the Bienal de Amposta, “Paisajes Deseados” at Arts Santa Mónica, Barcelona, “SUBVERSIÓ! Manifestacions perifèriques per a una història reversible” at El Born CCM, Barcelona or “Invation 30230” at Museo Central de Lima. In 2018 and 2019 he has received the Research and Experimentation Grant from La Escocesa, the Young Art Prize of Catalonia 2019 (Sala d’Art Jove) and in 2021 to develop his project “Real Expedición Botánica” in collaboration with La Panera de Lleida and Lo Pati, Amposta.

The Rose Garden

The Rose Garden. ENRIQUE MARTÍNEZ CELAYA

 

February 16 – March 12, 2022

 

UTA Artist Space.

403 Foothill Road, Beverly Hills, CA

 

 

 

OPENING RECEPTION: Wednesday, February 16, 6-8PM

 

 

UTA Artist Space and Unit London are pleased to announce a new immersive environment by the celebrated Los Angeles-based artist Enrique Martínez Celaya. The Rose Garden ambitiously brings together new paintings, sculptures, installations, photographs, garments, and writing, inviting viewers to consider the self—both its promise and its threat—through the mystical divination of memory.

 

 

 

What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.

 

T. S. Eliot, Burnt Norton (from Four Quartets)

 

 

 

For over two decades, Martínez Celaya has explored the limitless connections between art, literature, philosophy, and science through his practice. In this new and multifaceted body of work, the artist uses T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets as an entry point to exploring our collective memory—something broader, more permanent, and more irreparable than individual memory, and which belongs to us all. 

 

In this exhibition, as in past projects, Martínez Celaya again concerns himself with existential hunger, crisis, chaos, order, time, redemption, reality, and love—here tied together by the thread of Eliot’s words. As visitors enter UTA Artist Space’s main gallery, they will encounter Eliot’s poem written at their feet, and a series of large paintings depicting ice, sea, and fire, urging a meditation on the ever-changing, complicated nature of time and memory.

 

All three of UTA Artist Space’s galleries will be assumed by Martínez Celaya’s immersive environments, including a room of tears overlooked by a blood moon, photographs of gardens and bodies, a burnt figure on a seat of roses, a garment worn by love champions, and many other luminous chunks mined from life. Viewed collectively, these works and the artist’s concurrent solo exhibitions at Los Angeles museums—at The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens; USC Fisher Museum of Art; and Edward L. Doheny Jr. Memorial Library—remind us of the power art has to change our perceptions of the world and of our inner selves.

 

 

 

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alfons borrell

Inauguració / Inauguración / Opening

03/10, 19.30h

Balcó Foyer del Gran Teatre del Liceu

 

Exposició / Exposición / Exhibition

03.10 – 04.11.2019

 

Enguany, el llibre Temporada d’òpera d’Amics del Liceu serà il·lustrat per l’artista Alfons Borrell.

Per tal de fer la presentació d’aquestes obres de contingut operístic, la Galeria Joan Prats i els Amics del Liceu us convidem a la inauguració de l’exposició de dibuixos sobre les 10 òperes de la temporada del Liceu 2019-20.

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Este año, el libro Temporada d’òpera de Amics del Liceu estará ilustrado por el artista Alfons Borrell.

Para presentar estas obras de contenido operístico, la Galería Joan Prats y Amics del Liceu os invitamos a la inauguración de la exposición de dibujos sobre las 10 óperas de la temporada del Liceu 2019-20.

 

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This year, the book Saison of opera from Amics del Liceu will be illustrated by artist Alfons Borrell.

To present the artworks of operatic content, Galeria Joan Prats and Amics del Liceu would like to invite you to the opening of the exhibition of drawings about the 10 operas of the saison 2019-20 of the Liceu.

 

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Juan Usle, Ibiza

08.06.2019 – 31.10.2019

Museu d’Art Contemporani d’Eivissa

 

Juan Uslé

Inauguración el viernes 7 de junio de 2019 | Sala de Armas del MACE

Colaboran: Conselleria de Cultura del Govern Balear y AmicsMACE

 

Juan Uslé I Carbón y Maculares I 2011 – 2018 I Cartulina y técnica mixta I 56 x 71,2 cm. I Foto: Sergio Belinchón

 

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The Lisbon Totem #3, 2017

Opening: 26.9, 7 pm 

Exhibition October – November

 

 

We are pleased to announce Pedro Cabrita Reis´ first exhibition in our gallery, presenting a selection of recent works of sculpture, paintings and photography.

 

The work by Cabrita Reis includes a great variety of media, varying from photography and drawing to large-scale paintings and sculptures, composed of industrial and often found materials, as in the case of Floresta, 2017, which we are presenting in the exhibition, and they frequently reach architectural dimensions. In this exhibition, we encounter works made of different materials such as steel, wood, aluminium, glass, enamel, bronze and acrylic. In the words of the artist, “Everything that exists is material which can be used in the construction of a work of art”. Consequently, he does not establish hierarchies between the objects and materials he work with. For Cabrita Reis, the material is the way of looking and thinking that changes everything.

 

Cabrita Reis´ work investigates the limits between architecture, sculpture, painting and photography, while he primarily considers himself a painter. His work is three-dimentional, often very personal and aim to alter, define or question the limits of spatiality. The meaning remains mysterious and fascinating. The contemplation takes form in the material, reaching the spectator, provoking new questions and linking imagination to experience.

 

Pedro Cabrita Reis began his career in the 1980s, as one of the most distinguished artists of his generation, introducing an universe of archaic and mythical references, collective memory and individual revelation. His works have had a great impact on the Portuguese and international culture, incorporating, into the more radical modern heritage, the possibility of returning to more traditional artistic disciplines: drawing, painting and sculpture.

Alfons Borrell

Text by Alicia Kopf

 

We are pleased to announce Alfons Borrell’s new exhibition at Galeria Joan Prats, next Thursday December 15th.

 

After the exhibition dedicated to him by Fundació Miró, which gathered sixty years of artistic practice, we present the most recent work of this exceptional creator, who conceives painting as a space of relationship with the world and, at the same time, as an impulse, an emotion and that has stayed away of the tendencies and the prevailing movements throughout his trajectory.

 

His work is characterized by the importance of color and debate between subtlety and intensity, between openness to nature and introspective recollection. Bound since 1955 to the language of abstraction, he has been influenced in different moments of his life by Anglada Camarasa and Brossa, two artists who, beyond an aesthetic, provided him a vital and ethical attitude towards art. Borrell’s work has been and is currently intense and constant, always moving in parameters that he repeats with rigor and dedication.

 

The color in Alfons Borrell’s work is an invading agent that moves and fluctuates; the artist defines it as an extension of the person, which blends you with the environment, “if you walk through a forest full of fir trees you turn green, if you could immerse yourself in the sea you would get out blue… ” He says” I would like to be painting “. It is a vision of color and painting, linked to the concept, to the thought, and also to the experience. Borrell uses only five pigments extracted from the earth, green, blue, orange, ocher and gray; while white, from the surface of the canvas, emerges as an apparition of light.

 

To this work of color, which he has been using repeatedly for its symbolic connotations, the perception of presences and absences, from a particular experience of limits, is added. In his paintings, vertical lines cross the surface symbolically designating a presence, horizontal lines refer to the horizon, and the inability to contain color matter, which sometimes overflows marked margins, shows us the experience of the unlimited.

 

Borrell’s work needs an active contemplation on the part of the viewer, who establishes a relation of tension with the works. Their experimentation does not depend on codes of interpretation or previous knowledge, but his painting seems to go directly to the observers, interpellating them, but always leaving a space of freedom as a possibility to inhabit its language.

 

Alfons Borrell (Barcelona, 1931) lives and works in Sabadell. After an initial stage of formation in figurative painting, he got started in abstraction in 1955, with works close to informalism. Far removed from the academic art, he was part of Grup Gallot, an iconoclast and revolutionary group linked to gestural abstraction. This radical experience allowed him to find his own way, of sobriety and silence, throughout the 60’s. From 1976, he began to title his works with the exact date of its completion, like a journal, the same year that he participated in the group show Pintura 1, in the recently inaugurated Fundació Joan Miró of Barcelona, where he would return with a solo show two years later and, in 2015, with a great retrospective. Among the recent years’ exhibitions, stand the one held in 2006 at Centre Cultural Santa Tecla, L’Hospitalet de Llobregat, which traveled to Museu de Sabadell, the one about work on paper held in 2011 at Fundació Palau de Caldes d’Estrac and the one held the same year at Fundació Vila Casas. He has participated in group shows at MNAC, Centre Cultural Tecla Sala, MACBA, CCCB and Centre d’Art Santa Mònica, Barcelona, Museo Rufino Tamayo, Mexico City, Flanders Contemporary Art, Minneapolis, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia. In 2014 he received the GAC prize, an honorary award in recognition of his long career.

Luis Gordillo

Museo Reina Sofia. Edificio Nouvel

Colección 3.

La obra de Luis Gordillo (1934) nace de una compleja síntesis de elementos diversos, provenientes del informalismo, el arte pop y las corrientes geométricas, fuentes que alimentan su obra de manera simultánea e intencionalmente contradictoria. Su síntesis pictórica se presenta como la constante deconstrucción y reelaboración de una imagen que se reblandece, desinforma y confunde en su apariencia incompleta.

 

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Enrique Martínez Celaya

Palos, Cuba, 1964

Lives and works in Los Angeles

 

 

Enrique Martínez Celaya works with painting, developing it from the perspective of scientific thought, philosophical, poetic and intellectual.

 

His work brings a permanent concern about experience and representation to light. It is an answer to the surrounding world, especially to nature, the environment of being, and his own perception through ideas that appear over and over again: the child, the sea, the trees, the mountains, the animals, the birds.

 

Enrique Martínez Celaya’s works exposes the possibilities and limits of representation at the same time. His paintings are a poetic way to explore notions such as confidence, symbolism, displacement, fragmentation, integrity, time, memory and identity.

Fabian Marcaccio

Rosario, Argentina, 1963

Lives and works in New York

 

 

Fabian Marcaccio is one of the pioneers of digital painting. Attempting to redefine the pictorial genre, his work extends the temporal and spatial parameters, and tracks the integration of the hand-made and the machine-made.

 

In the nineties, he worked with composition and digital printing and, later on 3D printing, to create pictorial works that he calls Paintants, a neologism from painting and mutant. Marcaccio considers painting as a constellation of changing content, sometimes rendered as panels, sometimes as 3D configurations, sometimes as animations, and sometimes on an environmental scale.

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.

Luis Gordillo

Seville, 1934

Lives and works in Madrid

 

 

Luis Gordillo started his career during the fifties when he travelled to Paris and got acquainted with the European art of the time, in particular with artists such as Wols, Dubuffet, Michaux and Fautrier. In his first works the influence of surrealism and Tàpies can be appreciated to which an early seventies Pop art associated iconography would be incorporated in later years.

 

Gordillo becomes one of the permanently renovating painters of the pictorial language and one of the artists that during the early seventies reincorporate figuration. It’s likewise in that moment, when he starts to work with photographic images, that this, in some way or another, is introduced in the process of creation in his paintings.

 

Both ideas, that of the process and the continuous construction as resource of accumulation, are elements that are permanently present in his work.

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.

Victoria Civera

Port de Sagunt, Valencia, 1955

Lives and works between New York and Saro (Cantabria)

 

 

Victoria Civera’s career began in the seventies, working mainly photomontage. Over the next decade she focused on painting, abstract at first, but then introduced figurativism. In the middle of this decade Victoria Civera moves to New York and integrates photography and sculpture to her practice. Her creations undergo a transformation, making them more introspective.

 

Because of the iconography of her work, focused on the feminine universe, and because of her oneiric content, Victoria Civera has achieved a personal language, full of nuances. She moves in between large-scale pieces, in which she uses industrial materials, and suggested and poetic understatement pieces, often incorporating ordinary household objects.

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.

Bucharest, Romania, 1955

Lives and works in New York

 

 

Lydia Dona’s paintings hold many references to the city and the urban environment. So through tubes, screws and other objects that she superimposes to the colour stain, an enormous mechanism without human presence is revealed.

 

The surface of her paintings may recall the American abstract legacy of Pollock or Clyfford – Though the colours drift apart by their luminosity- that is juxtaposed to the mechanic images of the vanguards.

 

Lydia Dona maintains in her work the permanent conflict between urban abstractions with its noisy rhythm and the micro cosmos that makes it possible.

Palma Mallorca, 1962

Lives and works in New York

 

 

Macias has his roots in the so-called post-pop movement in Spain, depicting vividly colorful, abstract geometry. His early work can be read as a reformulation or assimilation of existing language from the culture of mass media. His works absorbs the formal pieces of an identifiable visual system, to bring its essential typologies together in a generic expression. They can be read as a semi-abstract reduction of the forms of everyday life. Several of Macias’ works apply the technique of interlocking figure and background, leading to the creation of double images, often not visible at first.

 

In recent years, Macias has been portraying imaginative characters in renderings that are still very colorful, but on the contrary carry grotesque and haunting features. They seem like they are dissolving, falling apart, but at the same time they convey their revulsion with an almost humoristic outrageousness; simple and iconographic, but also comic and personal.

 

Macias is interested in the artists role in fixing the forms of contemporary culture in the works; drawing attention to the painting, in his 2D- like figuration in his early days and pointing the mirror back towards the public in his confronting portraits.

  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.

Barcelona 1954

Lives and works in Barcelona

 

 

 

 

Josep Riera i Aragó can be described as a visual poet, a sculptor who is equally at ease in the painting studio or in the printmakers workshop. Very early in his artistic development he established a deceivingly simple iconography to surprisingly universal and inescapable results. During the 1980s Riera i Aragó discovers his interest in the deep-sea environment, submarines, airplanes and machines operated by engines. This trace of the machine has since then been a clear thread through his oeuvre. Never repetitive, each “machine” he creates, regardless of the medium, evokes without pathos or condescension, a clear and sympathetic view of humanity. They machines are not only blurring the traditional frontiers between sculpture and painting, finally overlapping the two artforms, it also blurs the space between functional machines with a direct purpose and the life of the objects as art pieces. Riera i Aragó’s work highlights the machines, seen in its own dysfunction, in what is has been created for but never manage to do. His zeppelins, airplanes, ships and submarines must assume their inability to sail or fly. 

 

Besides from Riera i Aragó’s sculptures made in bronze and at times recovered iron, his oeuvre also holds great paintings and works on paper utilizing the same iconography as the sculptures; propellers, engines and machines. Especially his later painting seems to almost mimic or portray his sculptures, creating a close narrative between the two. Riera i Aragó’s pieces are essential to the understanding of some of the most characteristic emblems of our time, the world of machines and artifacts in general. His works speaks paradoxically about the machine, its transience, its capacity for suggestion, on a journey back and forth from real to imaginary space.

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.

Javier Peñafiel

Zaragoza, 1964

Lives and works in Mallorca

 

 

Javier Peñafiel’s work, drawings, videos, texts and sculptures make up a linguistic system parallel to a reality to which he is unconnected.

 

All through his career, Javier Peñafiel has built up a universe inhabited by characters; by sentences that work autonomously, such as phrases that have the duty to bother the quiet and routine based use of the language by the spectator; or videos where diverse elements are combined in the shape of tableaux, sharing a space but keeping at the same time their identity separate.

 

The works of Javier Peñafiel show the necessity and the difficulty in direct communication. His works investigate the double identity – as obstacle and as a bridge- that the language represents in such communication.

Fernando Prats

Santiago de Chile, 1967

Lives and works in Barcelona

 

 

In his work Fernando Prats “paints” or, we’d rather say, recreates nature; he deals with registering tracks, making the invisible visible, giving voice and image to what was present but kept unnoticed.

 

Using seismographs, traces, photographs, videos… he registers the beat of different realities on smoked supports, from the flight of birds to the wild jet of a geyser, the deep coal of mines or the powerful waves that break against the cliff. Thus, Fernando Prats holds an unorthodox relationship with painting, both for the choice of his instruments and for the intervention of chance.

 

His work is formalized in actions which himself registers, that show the creative processes intrinsic to his work. Fernando Prats paintings are time-objects, as they condense in their finished form a story, the one of its creation, whose times often have nothing to do with the ones of the artist, but with the natural rhythms.

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.

Julião Sarmento

Lisbon, 1948- Estoril, 2021

 

 

From the early seventies, Julião Sarmento has explored the possibilities of painting, photography, sculpture, installation and video. There is a process of suggestive hiding in his works that situates the spectator not only as an observer but also as a participant of his narrative.

 

The woman is a recurring motive in his works and from it he elaborates concepts linked to sexuality, desire or seduction. The relationships he evokes, on latent tension, violence, obsession or mystery, are obtained from a meticulous dynamic between the participating agents in the physical space, in the case of installations, or in the edition, in case of films and videos. The resulting works unleash all the detached intrigue of the images in constant suspense and tension.

José María Sicilia

Madrid, 1954

 

 

José María Sicilia was one of the most significant representatives of Spanish painting in the eighties who identified himself with the young generation of artists that at the beginning of that decade, took up the practice of a `material´ perspective in painting

 

From 1985, Sicilia initiates a new series of works on the subject of flowers, by which he is specially recognized in Spain. This new thematic development would take him deeper in an investigation focused in the analysis of the shape, the construction of space and the structure of light.

 

In the abstract painting that this artist has developed lately, the use of wax acquires a main role for its possibilities of dialogue with light and the creation of spaces in the pictorial surface.

Soñé que revelabas (Madeira), 2019

Santander, 1954

Lives and works in New York and Saro (Cantabria)

 

 

Juan Uslé´s painting is based on his urban experience, particularly New York, where he moved in the late eighties. Visual perception, liquid – so mobile and fluid – and light structures and spaces, greatly influenced him, bringing forth a combination of geometric elements and organic elements in his compositions.

 

Juan Uslé works mixing his own colors and applying them by dispersion on canvas, building abstract images from geometric patterns, light and color. In each of his compositions he combines the search of an organization and structure, along with the appearance of the unexpected.

 

The painting of Juan Uslé analyzes, rather than expresses, the origin of his own images based on the urban experience. His practice is based on the interplay between formal antitheses, and so his work is defined as opposing dynamics.