Antoni Clave

Antoni Clavé - Serving v

Técnica: Carborundum engraving on lithographic background

Biografía del Artista: BARCELONA, SPAIN, 1913-2005 Spanish painter and sculptor. A student of the sculptor Ángel Ferrant and the painter José Mongrell, he began his painting career at the School of Fine Arts in Barcelona and made his professional debut through poster design, mainly for the cinema. Affiliated with 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 painting activities alongside 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 intimate paintings, some of them tending towards abstraction. He soon produced paintings with a marked expressionist and even cubist character, in which he systematically and especially dealt with the technique of collage, from which later the assemblages were derived. He first exhibited in Paris in 1949; since then his name has appeared in the Parisian galleries of Autumn and 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 Ville de Paris dedicated a major retrospective to him that included painting, collage and large films from 1958 to 1979. Clavé also entered the field of sculpture at a very young age, de Ferrant. Some pieces are based on found and recontextualized objects (influenced by Miró); on other occasions she 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 aftereffect of the ancient sculptures of Mediterranean tradition is evident, which have as their protagonist the symbol of fertility, represented in the mother goddesses, whom the Barcelona artist turns into nurses or queens. His style is somewhere between expressionism and symbolism; his paintings are notable for their invention and quality of drawings, as well as the exuberance of their colours and the rich texture of the materials, characteristics that are also applicable to his sculptures. 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, ​​organised by the Generalitat de Catalunya. And in April 1999 he inaugurated an exhibition at the Centro Cultural del Conde Duque in Madrid, focusing mainly on the pictorial production of the first three decades.