Carles Gabarró (Barcelona, 1956) has developed his artistic creation ceaselessly over the course of four decades, from the eighties to the present day. We want to highlight his determined commitment to material painting, and his own iconography characterized by an almost obsessive repetition of themes, objects and compositions. Furthermore, the constant mutation of different motifs, in a kind of multiform transformation of those same objects, seems to be the passage towards something else that never comes into being. The painting also navigates between the rhetorical resources of figuration and the expressive and suggestive forcefulness of abstraction, a journey that is neither resolved by the arrival at any port nor by a dreaded shipwreck. Carles Gabarró’s painting reveals to us a perspective on sameness and difference, on that which always remains the same and that which is ever-changing, and it manages to achieve it in a single move, almost in a single gesture, and the painting ends up being fixed in a fertile gaze.
This exhibition expresses this unique journey and highlights the aforementioned traits in the different stages of the artist’s creative work. The exhibition is laid out in four thematic areas: Magma (1995-1996), Libraries (2006-2024), Factories (2009-2015) and Beds (2013-2024), led and concluded by works from the eighties, alongside more recently-created pieces. The paintings from different periods seek tension through diverse iconographic and compositional analogies developed throughout by Carles Gabarró’s distinctive way of working in his painting.
Exhibition curated by Francesc Puntí.