Joan Colom was a photographer from the generation of the fifties, who renewed the photographic language to incorporate it into the prevailing avant-garde trends. His references were leading photographers from Paris and New York, such as Henri Cartier-Bresson, Brassaï, Man Ray, Walter Evans and Robert Frank. Black-and-white, covertly-shot images of the poorest working-class people in their neighbourhoods in Barcelona; photographic reports of great sociological, historical and documentary veracity for which he deservedly won the Premio Nacional de Fotografía from the Spanish Ministry of Culture in 2002.
Jordi Colomer is one of the most well-known artists, at home and abroad, and carved a niche in the field of video creation, although he is mainly defined as a sculptor. He studied at the Escola d’Art i Disseny in Barcelona, initially specializing in the history of art and then in architecture, all the while combining his studies with the theatre. The Barcelona artist’s work has drawn directly from the French situationists and filmmakers such as Luis Buñuel and Jean-Luc Godard, and encourages us to reflect on existential relativism and the kind of media culture that imprisons and subjugates us.
Albert Coma Bau is a painter and photographer, who has also created numerous installations. His creations reflect on the environment that surrounds us, on the landscapes that lead us to discover our innermost self. He plays with time and space, the interior and exterior, presence and absence, life and death in order to transgress stereotypical conventionalisms, something that makes his work an open platform towards freedom.
Narcís Comadira is a writer, poet and painter; as well as being a translator, curator, journalist, art critic and literary figure. He is a self-taught artist who tends towards warm colours and geometrical, simple and voluminous forms. His pictorial work combines lyricism with methodology, in which the compositions of firm and borderline strokes dissolve within a phantasmagorical atmosphere that evokes us towards abstraction. From his beginnings contained within the Noucentist style to which he adds the first Kandinsky-style expressionism, he has tried to capture reality by using connotations drawn from Pop Art and the transavantgarde, thus aiming to delve into the essence of the form, volume and light in order to evoke the most absolute lyricism.
Following the Spanish Civil War, while still a teenager, Josep Comes i Busquets started earning a living by painting the ceilings of burnt-out churches. He was a painter, decorator, graphic artist, advertising sign painter, as well as arts director and president of the Acadèmia de Belles Arts in Sabadell. His hyperrealistic style paintings, made with egg tempera on a wooden base, reflect in meticulous detail the great palaces, railway stations and interiors of modernist houses in Sabadell; in short, architectures filled with nuanced light and replete with intense sensitivity.
This photographic duet of Josep Compte Agrimon (Barcelona, 1910-1987) and Palatchi were, along with artists of the stature of Pere Català Pic and Josep Sala, two of the most important advertising photographers in the thirties. During that decade they made numerous photomontages for companies such as Formitrol and Lápiz Termosán, in which they combined photography and advertising using the typographic advances of the time. In these pioneering works of advertising-photo-reportage, made in a surrealist and chiaroscuro style, the advertised product floats over an infinite darkness. In other work, they also took numerous photographs of stage sets and performances of the Russian ballets at the Gran Teatre del Liceu, Barcelona, captured in an intoxicating dramatic style.
Francesc Congost studied graphic design at La Llotja in Barcelona. He is a painter with a realistic style, immortalizing buildings, avenues and urban spaces in meticulous detail through a poetic and serene atmosphere. They are landscapes that emerge in the mists of memory and approach cosmopolitanism.
Xavier Corberó was a sculptor of open-air and private works, a painter, jewellery designer and interior decorator. His beginnings were based on the interdisciplinary ideas and comprehensive training introduced by the Bauhaus. The manipulation of the materials used becomes an evolution of the material and formal world of the work. The symbiosis of simple and abstract forms, in an apparent purity and nakedness, and their complex symbolic meaning produce a kaleidoscopic sensitivity in the eyes of the viewer. In 1972 he founded the Centre d’Activitats i Investigacions Artístiques in Esplugues de Llobregat.
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