Originally from Olot, Josep Clarà moved after his training to live in Paris. There, his reference was Auguste Rodin and his sculptural work drew on symbolism to express human emotions through volume. Later on, influenced by Maillol, he developed his work to classic and Mediterranean styles linked to Noucentism. The Greco-Latin references, formal synthesis and purifying volumes led to an idealization of bodies and faces during the 1930s, the decade when he returned to Catalonia. Back in his homeland, Clarà undertook projects for public spaces and his career culminated with some monumental works based on the search for beauty.
A self-taught painter of portraits, bullfighting scenes and urban visions full of expressionism, energetic colours and dense textures that make up his first artworks up until the early eighties. Later, the colours are attenuated within compositions that explore the fast, calligraphic stroke and the pointillism or dripping. At the beginning of the nineties, his career took a turn towards the abstract current, with blurred images that allude to novelistic literature.
Painter who is representative of the constructivist current in Catalan art. Composition, rhythm, movement, formal structure and spatial organization are the reflexive constants of a meticulous work in which nothing is left to chance. Furthermore, the colours are laid out in essential layers of light and shade, subtle gradations of white, black and grey, that instil a unique sensation of space in the crystalline and abstract dimension of geometric proportions, creating the illusion of a third dimension. In 1976, he was awarded the first prize in the Joan Miró International Drawing Competition.
Montserrat Clausells’ ruddy abysses come after each other in rich stratifications of eclipsed tones and interchange in watery refractions and phantasmagorical mists… landscapes of the soul that inhabit a world of symmetrical structures in order to project themselves in an assumption of personal introspection. Evocation, insinuation, timelessness, a dream reminiscent of the Odilon Redon’s mystical style or Gustave Moreau’s more abstract style; ethereal brushstrokes of sweet mystery in which the viewer embarks on a long voyage in space and time.
Antoni Clavé was a multifaceted artist who synthesized figuration with abstraction, the effects of trompe l’œil with the force of matter, the incorporation of the object with the gestural stroke, and the sources of tradition with the concerns of the avant-gardes. Through his exile in Paris and friendship with Pablo Picasso he became immersed in the world of collage and assemblages. He researched all kinds of textures and materials and mastered the techniques of engraving, lithography, etching, copper and its many chalcographic procedures. He was awarded the Medalla de Oro by the Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid (1984); the Medalla d’Or by the Generalitat de Catalunya for his innovative art; and the UNESCO award in the discipline of graphic art.
Narcís Coderch’s work is based on an interpretation of the elements in the landscape and liturgical objects. He is a keen collector of the versatility of objects from his surroundings that he manipulates with irony, and makes the viewer take part in a range of stimuli. Through the use of a figurative language, he decontextualizes the objects in order to show us a faceted and almost unknown reality, within a false, unreal and even surrealist context.
Josep M. Codina is a painter of sensations that emerge from the clash between pleasure and pain, plenitude and austerity. Through the use of horizontal lines, he shows the skin from some part of the human body. Folds that bear witness to the passage of time, a summary of experiences and an identifying sign of our existence. He superimposes glazes, rubbings and splashes onto a soft background, and he uses graphite to trace shadows of simple and sinuous forms. The whole work is covered in paraffin which endows it with a faded, blurry atmosphere. The artist applies an innovative vision onto everyday reality by focusing his gaze on all those things that have not be the subject of our attention.
Pep Codó’s sculpture is a recognition of the forms of nature, the processes of transformation and, therefore, the imprint of time on our natural and social relief. Through a conscious study of stone material, he examines its sensitive nucleus in order to give volume to a body that we can understand at first as amorphous and, blow by blow, he searches for its real symbolism and meaning, the definitive sculptural form of that stone, giving life to something that we thought to be completely inert. In this way, the final result shows the full evolutionary process of the piece, from conceptualization to the final touch.
Hannah Collins is an artist and filmmaker, known for her photographic installations. She studied at Slade School of Fine Art in London and in the USA with a Fullbright scholarship. Her work focuses on collective memory and what connects the common features of a universal culture. Her photographs are dominated by a great sense of mystery that is reinforced by the impression they convey that time has stopped. They are almost dreamlike scenes in which a certain degree of symbolism, association of ideas and cultured references seek the complicity of the viewer.
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