Through a wide range of languages – sculpture, video, installation, photography and drawing – and the use of irony, Toni Giró presents his particular way of understanding the world. In recent years, his work has focused on linguistics and the imperfection implicit in translation, which Giró expresses by using play on words and visual artifices taken to their ultimate consequences. He uses his interest in the image and its condition as appearance and projection to apply a critical approach to the present and point out the limits and possible vanishing points of contemporaneity. He won a scholarship at Socrates Sculpture Park in New York (1991) and the Associació Catalana de Crítics d’Art prize (2008) for his exhibition Action must not be reaction, but creation.
Maria Girona grew up in a culturally-rich family environment. She trained at the Acadèmia Tàrrega, where she met other painters of her generation and with whom she founded the Els Vuit group, one of the first artists’ groups seeking an artistic renewal in Catalonia.
Her artwork, drawing on Matisse’s painting and pre-civil war Noucentist Catalan Mediterraneanism, rejected the artifice and virtuosity of the painting that was so prevalent in the early years of the Francoist dictatorship, but rather sought modernity, through her use of colour and essentiality. Throughout her life, she was loyal to her artistic principles, neither tempted by fads nor effectivism, and she focused on a very personal figuration, with the exception of a series of collages of high plastic interest which she made during the sixties. Along with her husband, Albert Ràfols Casamada, she was involved in the most innovative initiatives of the time and she took part in the process of creating the EINA Design School.
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