BARCELO

Barcelo was born in Majorca in 1957. Aged 18, he enrolled at the San Jordi School of Art in Barcelona, but only stayed there a few monts. During this period, he took part in action of protest against the politaical situation in Spain, then joined the Anarchists and Greeens who where preventing the take-over of a small island for a real-estate project. Barcelo realised a poster for a green association in 1989.

His first shows were held in Barcelona and Majorca ; and in the early eighties Barcelo began subjecting his paintings to outdoor weathering and to the resulting stains and cracks. In 1982 Barcelo held his first one man show out of Spain at the Axe Art Gallery in Toulouse, which triggered the Bordeaux Contemporary Art Museum to buy several of his works ; next Barcelo took part in the Documenta VII in Kassel. Moving to Naples in 1983, Barcelo worked with ashes from the Vesuvio and with local colour pigments, the works being on show on Lucio Amelio Gallery ; they were next shown by Yvon Lambert in Paris, where the art dealer Bruno Bischofberger bought the majority of them. The following year Miquel Barcelo worked in Portugal, where he continued his experiments, mixing his paint with sand, pebbles and seaweeds. His next studio was a disused church in Paris, where Barcelo produced a set of works using the Louvre, libraries and cinémas as thematic material. He held a show at Bishofberger 's gallery in Zürich, which became his regular gallery. The new York Museum of Modern Art showed his work, followed by the Bordeaux Musée d'Art Contemporain and the Boston Contemporary Art institute ; his pictures were bought by several museums. Barcelo next moved to Farrutx, and began to collaborate with the photographer Jean Marie del Moral. Barcelo made his first trip in Africa in 1998, where he mainly worked on paper, using local pigments ; in the following years, Barcelo returned there for stays of several months at a time.

Barcelo began his first original prints in 1981in the Soler Atelier in Majorca, two years later, he realized a few lithographs in black and white with Bramsen and Clot, but it is in 1990 that Miquel Barcelo did his most important prints with ITEM in Paris with especially 4 original lithographs with additional varnish for a text of Paul Bowles included camel, original lithograph and Mali lithograph inspired by his travels in Africa. This collaboration with ITEM gave several prints, for example the series of the bullfight ot he big lithograph called figs. Barcelo made more than 30 lithographs in this period, most of them with small edition, that explains explains their scarcity on the market today.

A few years before, Barcelo produced etchings and aquatints at Pasnic 's studio, some are masterpieces such as the etching gran cuina from 1984 or the etching called oysters. Here again the edition of these prints are very small (some of there were printed at only 16 copies). Between 1999 and 2002, Barcelo made a series of 64 etchjings, called "Lanzarote series", all of them printed at 41 copie and taking up the themes of his earlier paintings (Still lifes, bullfights, animals and landscapes of Africa).

Barcelo met Hervé Guibert in 1990, who wrote the foreword to a catalogue of his show in Nîmes in 1991. During that year, Barcelo built a floating studio aboard which he sailed down the Niger river, producing works about canoes and life of the river and its banks. In 1992, Barcelo made 48 lithographs, some comprising embossed reliefs, to illustrate an erotic book by the blind writer Evgen Bavcar. Barcelo also painted a set of portraits of his wife Cecile, of Evgen Bavcar, of Bishofberger, of Castor Seibel etc. In 1995, a show of his works was held in the IVAM in Valencia ; that year he made his first ceramic pieces in Mali (Africa), as well as large-size portraits of his Dogon friends. Then came 2 shows in Paris : at the Jeu de Paume and at the Centre Pompidou. In 1988, he set up his studio in the disused church of Santa Eulalia dei Catalani in Sicilia, the wall of which he decorated, and were he showed the ceramics he had made in Majorca. Moving to the Jakubec workshop, he produced a hundred more ceramic pieces for an exhibition at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. Barcelo is a master of ceramic processes, just as he perfectly masters prints techniques (lithograph and engraving). He has lately made a set of low-relief ceramic wall panels for Majorca Cathedral, and is presently illustrating Dante's Divine Comedy with a series of lithographs. Barcelo lives and works in Paris, in Majorca, in Mali.

- Barcelo ou la peinture. Text from Castor Seibel, Echopppe Publisher, 1992.
- Miquel Barcelo, le sentiment du temps. Text from Enrique Juncosa, Echoppe publisher, 2003. (book including 3 texts published in different catalogues in 1994 and 1999). "Barcelo's work is very far from the analytical reductionisms prevalent in art at present. His work is complex, playing with various elements : the textural richness of the surface, his metaphorical richness and his effectiveness of his language, the infinity of autobiographical and cultural references, the constant return to the same topics or variations with differents and sometimes opposite treatments, the importance of light and transparence... Barcelo is unprejudiced and open to all the possibilities of painting, dominating its language to the point of excess, as does the Cuban writer Jose Lezama Lima in poetry and narrative."
- Miquel Barcelo. Catalogue of exhibition in the Museum of Modern Art of Lugano en 2006 - 2007. It is the last great retrospective of Barcelo, paintings from the period 1982 to 2006."
- Ninety, Miquel Barcelo. Number 6 of the famous review devoted to Miquel Barcelo, 1991, many reproductions, text of Jean-Luc Chalumeau “From Tintoret to Barcelo” and of Catherine Flohic “Miquel Barcelo”. Photographs from Jean Marie del Moral."In its way, Barcelo lets the image emerge from an abstract pictoral field : sophisticated art whose ironic mannerism effectively blend obvious ease with numerous references to the history of the avant-garde movements."
- Miquel Barcelo, Catalogue of the exhibition Miquel Barcelo in the Museum of Contemporary Art of Nîmes in 1991. It is the first big retrospective of Barcelo in France, text from Hervé Guibert. More than 60 paintings and drawings are reproduced in this very rare catalogue of Barcelo.

You can also find some important catalogues of exhibition of Miquel Barcelo while clicking on certain images of prints for sale or already sold.