The Natural World of the Spanish artist Miquel Barceló
Who is Miquel Barcelo?
One of Spain's most acclaimed contemporary artists, Miquel Barceló He is known for his mixed media relief paintings, expressive bronze sculptures and ceramics. Miquel Barceló began his career as a painter, but over the last five decades his work has evolved into various techniques: relief sculptures, installation and ceramics. Today, he is one of Spain's most important artists, and his work continually pays homage to his country's artistic lineage – Goya, Picasso, Joan Miró It is Antoni Tàpies (the last two were his friends).
the career of Miquel Barceló
Born in 1957 in Felanitx, Mallorca, Barceló lives and works between Paris and Mallorca. In 1974, he entered the School of Fine Arts in Palma de Mallorca, before joining the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Barcelona. After attending classes at the School of Decorative Arts in Palma de Mallorca that year, Barceló enrolled at the School of Fine Arts in Barcelona in 1975, where he attended classes for a few months before returning to Mallorca. Back in Mallorca, Barceló joined the conceptual avant-garde group “Taller Lunatic”, taking part in its demonstrations and events made possible by the change in the political climate after Franco's death. During this time, Barceló experimented with creating conceptual works that explore the behavior of matter and decomposition; early works included wooden and glass boxes that contained decaying food and unorthodox organic materials. 1980s: Miquel Barceló
In the early 1980s, Barceló gained international renown as one of Spain's leading painters, gaining fame after representing Spain at the Documenta exhibition in Kassel in 1982. Throughout the 1980s, Barceló's work was included in many international exhibitions. His work was embraced by the international neo-expressionist movement, which rejected the prevailing trend against imagery (the so-called “death of painting”) in favor of portraying recognizable subjects in an expressive, gestural aesthetic. In the mid-1980s, Barceló began to eliminate the narrative elements from his paintings, a reduction that culminated in his series of abstract white paintings begun after the artist spent six months traveling through the Sahara desert in 1988. After living for several years in Paris, Barcelona and New York, Barceló was invigorated and fascinated by the cultural and physical environment of West Africa. Inspired by the dramatic African light, the scorched earth and the rocky landscape, Barceló created a series of pale canvases with an intense texture that recall the arid and rugged terrain of the desert. After his first trip to Africa, the artist maintained a small house and studio in Mali for many years, living without electricity or running water among the local rural population. Drawing on cultural and geographic diversity for inspiration. In addition to his white paintings, he made a series of portraits, still lifes and domestic scenes inspired by everyday life in sub-Saharan Africa. 1990s: Miquel Barceló
In 1990, Barceló began a series of bullfighting scenes inspired by a commission to create a poster for the bullfighting festival in Nîmes in 1988. In these paintings, Barceló depicts the concentric rings of the bullring, creating surfaces of remarkable texture, impasto and full dynamism and swirling energy. Barceló draws parallels between the way he creates his pictorial surfaces and the way the bullfighter works through the sand in the arena, with the canvas registering the painter's marks while the sand follows the movements of the bull and the fighter. By adopting this culturally resonant theme, long symbolic of Spanish national identity, Barceló continues the tradition of great Spanish painters, from Francisco de Goya to Pablo Picasso It is Salvador dalí. Before the ban on bullfighting in Catalonia in 2012, after nearly 700 years of fighting, Barceló designed the official poster for the last bullfight in Barcelona. 2000s: The Mastery of Miquel Barceló
Since 2000, Miquel Barceló which explores themes inspired by his extensive travels, and has completed several major commissions, including the Blessed Sacrament Chapel in Palma de Mallorca cathedral and the Human Rights and Alliance of Civilizations summit at the United Nations in Geneva. For the Cathedral of Palma, Barceló worked for six years to cover the entire chapel in terracotta, illustrating the miracle of the loaves and fishes in elaborate ceramics with the figure of Christ hovering over the tabernacle. The extraordinary design detail recalls the modernist style of Catalan architect Antoni Gaudí, who also worked on the interior of Palma's cathedral. Barceló's elaborate work on Palma's cathedral demonstrates the mastery of ceramics, which has taken center stage in the artist's work since the mid-1990s.
In the remarkable installation of Miquel Barceló at the United Nations, which was unveiled to the public in November 2008, covered the room's massive vaulted ceiling in vibrant, multicolored stalactite shapes. Together with a team of twenty assistants, Barceló created these cavernous shapes with a plaster base, to which they apply colored paints made with pigments from all over the world. Barceló applied a directional spray of bluish gray paint to this radiant, multicolored surface, which makes the appearance of the ceiling change according to the observer's perspective in the room. From some angles, the blue-gray tone predominates, and from others, the installation radiates vivid rainbow hues; this emphasis on perspective shows the importance of looking at work from different points of view, just as perspective informs the issues being discussed at the United Nations. The artistic journey of Miquel Barceló
In the mid-1980s, Barceló began to eliminate narrative elements from his works, creating an increasingly unreal space punctuated by holes, cracks and transparencies. This simplification process culminated in 1988, the year in which he traveled through the Sahara and created his paintings in white. Drawing on cultural and geographic diversity as inspiration, his stay in Mali, where he set up a studio, was a formative experience. For Miquel Barceló, painting is a visceral way of relating to the world and, as such, his art is linked to the primitive beauty of cave paintings. Miquel Barceló expands the technical limits of representation while remaining rooted in the great tradition of painting, following in the footsteps of Picasso and Goya in depicting bullfighting scenes or baroque painters in commissioning the Cathedral of Palma de Mallorca. Fascination with Nature
His fascination with the natural world has inspired richly textured canvases that evoke the earthy materiality of Art Informel, as well as compositions that study the effects of light and the ever-changing colors of the sea. Always experimenting with non-traditional materials such as volcanic ash, food, algae, sediments and homemade pigments, his works carry the traces of the fierce energy that animates his creative process.
the influence of Miquel Barceló over the years
Despite his deep connection to Spain, he is inspired by his time spent in various locations, having lived and worked in Barcelona, Portugal, Palermo, Paris, Geneva, New York, the Himalayas and West Africa. He gained international recognition after his participation in the Bienal de São Paulo (1981) and in documenta 7 in Kassel (1982). In 2009, he represented Spain at the 53rd Venice Biennale. His work has been exhibited at the Center Pompidou, Paris (1996); National Museum Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid (1999); Musée du Louvre, Paris, where he exhibited more than 300 drawings illustrating Dante's Divine Comedy (2004); Rufino Tamayo Museum, Mexico City (2005); Museo d'arte della Svizzera Italiana Lugano, Switzerland (2006); Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2008); CAC Malaga (2008); Bank Austria Kunstforum Wien, Vienna (2012); Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris (2016); and Picasso Museum, Paris (2016). His public commissions include large-scale sculptural installations for the Chapel of Saint Peter in the Cathedral of Palma de Mallorca (2001-06) and the Chamber of Human Rights and Alliance of Civilizations at United Nations Headquarters in Geneva (2008).
His travels influenced and shaped his work, and his work was transformed as he experimented with new environments around the world, from the arid deserts of Africa to the rocky landscape and underwater marine universe of the Balearic Islands. the fascination of Miquel Barceló through the natural world inspired richly textured canvases that recall the earthly materiality of Catalan painters like Antoni Tàpies and Joan Miró, as well as compositions that study the effects of light and the ever-changing colors of the sea. Always experimenting with the materials of his art, Miquel Barceló he remained focused on the expressive qualities of his materials to explore texture, feel and surface.
