Angel Bofarull

Angel Bofarull - The wax image, Collage, 18 x 11 cm, 1998.

Technique: Collage on book cover

Artist Biography:

 

Ángel Bofarull Viladàs (Barcelona, 1957) has been considered by critics as one of the best collagists in our country. His early studies in Barcelona were of no importance to him, but his admission to the Montessori school in the United States in 1973, where he discovered the work of Duchamp and the New York Moma, was. He obtained a degree in Art History at the University of Barcelona. A solitary artist, he left Barcelona to "hide in the center of Valencia" (in the words of the critic Miguel Fernández-Cid) and spent ten years living in the rustic village of Ribaroja d'Ebre. Since 2015 he lives in the south of France and Barcelona. Since the eighties he has been making collages, drawings and objects. His work, indebted to Dada, surrealism and his admired Joseph Cornell, is autobiographical, although always avoiding the anecdote. In both collages and objects, he often chooses images from the Baroque, the nineteenth century or the early twentieth century and objects from these periods, in which he is a true expert. His memories of the family farmhouse in Plana d'Urgell (Lérida) are reflected in his work, as well as the world described in the works of the Brontë sisters, Balzac's Cousin Pons, or the Russian poet Tyutchev. He also recognizes himself in the diaries of Tolstoy, in the works of Walt Whitman, in those of Turgenev, in those of Jean Genet, in those of René Crevel or in those of Robert Walser. Some old collages are almost poem-collages, by the inclusion of words or writings, while others, by their conceptual character, evoke those of Francis Picabia. And others, finally, take us to the world of birds and children, to the smile or the melancholy of ancient women, mysteriously seductive.