Ramon Casas was one of the most distinguished artists in Catalan modernism. An excellent painter, draughtsman and poster artist he soon felt a strong attraction to painting and the cultural movements that were happening in Barcelona at the time. When he was just eleven years old, he began studying art with Vicens Cots and later, on his first trip to Paris, he was welcomed by the famous painter Carolus Duran. He was also a co-founder of the Pèl & Ploma and Forma arts and literary magazines, and financed, along with Pere Romeu, Santiago Rusiñol and Miquel Utrillo, Els Quatre Gats, a Parisian-style bistro in Barcelona that became a meeting place for artists and intellectuals of the time. In terms of his work, both in capturing everyday scenes and events, as well as his posters and charcoal portraits, Ramon Casas’ unmistakable strike, influenced by Japanese art and French impressionists, transcends the limits of the prevailing academicism to endow the bodies with rhythmic and natural movements which, combined with a composition on the plane free of adornments and visual obstacles, captures the essential beauty of his subjects, whether in their gaze, smiles, the flow of their hair, or even just in the position of a hand emerging from a random line.
Xevi Casas is a primary school teacher and self-taught photographer. He has recently held several exhibitions – La Ruta de l'Art in Castelló d'Empúries, Girona – and has been shortlisted for the Dolors Porredon Street Photography Prize in Granollers.
Pascual Casaubón adopts the Ulldecona stone from his land and infuses it with life and synthesis. He disfigures the mass to reveal a kind of living, organic body. It is art in tension, sensual forms from which water flows, crevices, strata, sediments, phallic, ovoid forms and mounds that rise towards the sky or extend across the ground. A fusion of the exactitude of straight lines and the grace of curves, which are like precipices that draw us towards a vertiginous void. His most recent works are notable for geometric forms of a symbolic abstraction, reminiscent of Gaudí’s Catalan modernism.
Xaro Castillo co-founded, along with Agustí Fructuoso, the TPK Art i Pensament Contemporani project in 1977, an institution that avoids academicist stereotypes and has developed important research and teaching in the range of artistic disciplines. She studied at Escola Massana and the Facultat de Belles Arts, Universitat de Barcelona, and with a clear transgressive will fuses different materials and disciplines – painting, sculpture, video, photography – in her creation of over a hundred projects, either on her own or in collaboration with other artists.
Visual artist and photographer, with a PhD in Fine Arts from the Universidad Complutense in Madrid and higher studies in photography from Milan and New York. Her artistic projects focus on the anthropization of the territory, the environment, sustainability and new imaginaries of the landscape. She also carries out more documentary-style work, in which she collaborates with architects and landscape artists in the interpretation and treatment of the territory. Her artwork highlights the transformation of landscapes caused by the modernization of society, and explores in-depth an interpretation of our landscape as a reflection of our culture. She has participated in cultural projects and exhibitions with photography and installations, both at national and international level, such as at the Corcoran Gallery of Art (Washington, USA) in 1994, and at Festival Revela’t 2023 with the exhibition Piel Ibérica y TransEuropeas, among many others.
Pere Català-Pic was one of the main representatives of the Catalan photographic avant-garde in the thirties, an industrial poster artist, author of numerous articles and illustrator of books on the potential of the photographic image in advertising. By using dramatic lighting effects, he made bold forays into photomontage in which he amalgamated the coexisting trends in the interwar period: surrealism, constructivism, New Objectivity, Bauhaus and the advertising poster of the Dadaists and Man Ray. He worked as a journalist and graphic designer for the Propaganda Commission of the Generalitat de Catalunya during the Spanish Civil War.
Through his father, Pere Català-Pic, Francesc Català-Roca started learning photography when he was only thirteen years old. But it was not until 1947, once he had his own studio, that he focused on industrial photography and illustration. He worked with various magazines such as the weekly Revista and the group of architects Grup R. His images range from natural and urban landscape to artistic and ethnographic documentation. He portrayed key figures from our culture such as Salvador Dalí, Joan Miró, Josep Pla, among others. Throughout his career he has garnered numerous awards: the Premio Nacional de Artes Plásticas (1983) from the Spanish Ministry of Culture, the Creu de Sant Jordi from the Generalitat de Catalunya (1992) and the Medalla d’Or al Mèrit Artístic from the Ajuntament de Barcelona (1993).
In 1967, Toni Catany began working as a freelance photographer creating travel reports for La Vanguardia and Destino. Ever since his first exhibition in 1972, his work has featured in countless public and private collections around the world. He was awarded the Premio Nacional de Fotografía from the Spanish Ministry of Culture and the Premi Nacional d’Arts Plàstiques from the Generalitat de Catalunya, both in 2001. His images emerge from contemplating faceted nature, in order to immortalize it in its purest state. He often experimented with nineteenth-century photographic techniques, such as calotype and Polaroid, whereby nudes, landscapes, portraits and still lifes intoxicated by a melancholic atmosphere reflect timelessness and reality.
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