Antoni Clavé

Antoni Clavé - In black and blue

Artist Biography: BARCELONA, SPAIN, 1913-2005. Spanish painter and sculptor. A disciple of the sculptor Angel Ferrant and the painter Jose Mongrell, he began painting at the School of Fine Arts in Barcelona and his foray into the professional field came through poster design, mainly in cinema. Affiliated to the Republican Army during the Spanish Civil War, in January 1939 he went into exile in France, where he spent some time in a refugee camp. He continued his pictorial activities, together with a group of Spanish painters, the so-called School of Paris. In 1941 he established his first studio in Montparnasse. His emotional stability and the birth of his son gave rise to a series of paintings of an intimate character, some of them tending towards abstraction. He soon produced paintings of a marked expressionist and even cubist character, in which he dealt systematically and in a special way with the collage technique, from which later derived the assemblages. He exhibited for the first time in Paris in 1949; since then his name has appeared in the Parisian halls of Autumn and at the Société Générale des Beaux-Arts, and also in Rome, Stockholm, Geneva, Copenhagen, London and Nice. The culmination of his recognition as a renowned painter came in 1978, when the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Villa in Paris devoted a major retrospective that included painting, collage and large tapes from 1958 to 1979. Clavé also entered the field of sculpture at a very young age, by Ferrant. Some pieces are based on found objects and recontextualized (Miró's influence); on other occasions he makes boxes, cabinets and reliquaries, especially in wood, based on assembled and polychrome pieces that maintain at the same time the ambiguity of the sculptural and the pictorial. Within this field, the small bronzes stand out, where the sequel of the ancient sculptures of Mediterranean tradition that have as protagonist the symbol of fertility, represented in the mother goddesses, whom the artist from Barcelona turns into nurses or queens. Her style is somewhere between expressionism and symbolism; in her painting the invention and quality of the drawings are remarkable, as well as the exuberance of her color and the rich texture of the materials, characteristics also applicable to her sculptural work. In 1989 he presented a retrospective exhibition of his sculptures at the Palau de la Virreina in Barcelona, which included works made between 1939 and 1986. A year later, in 1990, he inaugurated an anthological exhibition of all his paintings at the Palau Robert in Barcelona, organized by the Generalitat de Catalunya. And in April 1999 he inaugurated an exhibition at the Centro Cultural del Conde Duque in Madrid, focused mainly on the pictorial production of the first three lustrums.