Miquel Barceló

Miquel Barceló - Lanzarote (48-62)

Technique: Aquatint

Artist Biography: (Felanitx, Mallorca, 1957) Spanish artist who is among the most quoted and unanimously recognized of the current scene. Endowed with a formidable creative force, his work ranges from immense canvases and murals to terracotta sculptures and ceramics. His painting incorporates numerous cultural references, among which the Mediterranean background is worth mentioning at an early stage, and following his stay in Mali, which began in 1988, the African landscape and way of life; more recently he has introduced in his work complex and intellectualized reflections on the artist's private environment, such as his workshop or his library. Miquel Barceló's early interest in art comes from his mother, a painter in the Mallorcan landscape tradition; he was first dazzled when he traveled to Paris in 1974 and discovered the paintings of Paul Klee, Jean Dubuffet, and the works of art brut in general, which would have a lasting impact on him.That same year he began attending drawing and modeling classes at the School of Decorative Arts in Palma de Mallorca, and shortly thereafter he entered the Sant Jordi School of Fine Arts in Barcelona, although he barely attended classes during the first months; instead, his self-taught training was decisive: he read voraciously all kinds of works and gradually explored the paintings of Lucio Fontana, Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, among other prominent artists.In 1976 he participated in the happenings and protest actions of the Taller Llunàtic group, and with them he held his first exhibition in Barcelona, at the Mec-Mec gallery, in 1977; the following year he exhibited in Mallorca canvases covered with paint to which he incorporated organic elements. Later he experimented with thick layers of paint on canvases that he subjected to the elements, to provoke spontaneous physical and chemical reactions in them, such as oxidation or cracking, which exposed the entrails of the painting. His participation in the Sâo Paulo Biennial (1981) and in Documenta de Kassel VII (1982) projected him onto the international art scene at the height of his youth. The main museums and galleries of the world began to demand him and his paintings reached a very high price, unusual for an artist of his age. With equal haste came important awards: in 1986 he won the National Plastic Arts Award, and in 2003 he received the Prince of Asturias Award for the Arts.Barceló has lived for long periods in Mali, an African country whose light, like that of the Mediterranean, has left deep traces in his painting. In 1992 he secretly married Cecile, a Dutch specialist in literature, in the town of Artá. Months later, in August of that year, he became a father for the first time when his wife gave birth in Mallorca to a baby girl named Marcela María Celia. The couple lives in their house-workshop in Sa Devesa de Ferrutx (Mallorca). In 2002 he made a memorable illustration of Dante's Divine Comedy, and in 2007 he inaugurated an extraordinary ceramic altarpiece in the chapel of the Blessed Sacrament in the cathedral of Palma de Mallorca, which recreates the miracle of the loaves and fishes, and in November 2008 he presented to the public the decoration of the dome of Room XX of the United Nations Palace in Geneva, named "Hall of Human Rights and the Alliance of Civilizations". This work, which covers 1600 square meters and cost 20 million euros, can only be appreciated by the viewer in fragments, due to its large surface; in it, the artist gave shape to thousands of marine stalactites that together evoke a great universal sea.Baroque painting, art brut, American abstract expressionism, Italian arte povera, the works of Joan Miró and Antoni Tàpies are among the influences that Barceló has transfigured into a formidable personal synthesis of neo-expressionist nature and overflowing imagination, of dense material presence and immense plastic richness.