Miquel Barceló

This catalogue has been produced for the Barceló exhibition in Lugano, and brings together around sixty paintings created by the artist between 1982 and the present. Barceló, from Majorca, is one of the leading figures in contemporary Spanish art and this catalogue highlights some of the distinguishing features of his work.

Barceló's early work was inspired by conceptual art and was based on experimentation with the decomposition of materials. At the beginning of the 1980s he drew close to avant-garde artists who were asserting the pleasure of the pictorial act and promoting a return to figurative work. His style at the time was direct and iconoclastic. His international success came with participation in the Documenta exhibition in Kassel in 1982. His painting was then distinguished by personal expressionism and dealt with themes such as still life, libraries and self-portraits.

His works are large and his subjects are first and foremost intentionally autobiographical - Barceló depicts himself as he paints, alluding to the role of the demiurge incarnated as artist - or they are inspired by daily life (still life, portraits, landscapes). However, this thread with the great themes of classical painting is loaded with negativity: vegetables and fruit are in the process of rotting, animals are often reduced to mere carcases, skulls or skeletons, portraits are grim and landscapes bare. Moreover, he experiments with these subjects by using new pictorial techniques and pigments, such as organic and inorganic materials.

Experimenting using different artistic techniques enables Barceló to represent and present the reality of the world, captured in its essentiality and truth, free from the superfluous and expressed showing the constant flux of life and death. As such, in the works of this artist the world becomes an interpenetration of solids and voids, material that is produced and that is always changing. In addition, his work is further enriched by much travelling: Majorca, where he was born, Barcelona, Paris, New York, Naples and Africa above all, with its colours, its desert, its emptiness, its intense light and strong shadows: this continent has become his preferred place, the one most closely related to the poetry of his art.