Miquel Barcelo

Miquel Barceló - Anguillas

Biografía del Artista: (Felanitx, Mallorca, 1957) Spanish artist who is one of the most sought-after and unanimously recognised artists on the current scene. Endowed with a formidable creative force, his work ranges from immense canvases and murals to terracotta and ceramic sculptures. His painting incorporates numerous cultural references, among which the Mediterranean background stands out in the first stage, and following his stay in Mali, which began in 1988, the African landscape and way of life; more recently he has introduced into his work complex and intellectualised reflections on the artist's private environment, such as his studio or his library. Another notable area of ​​his artistic activity is book illustration, a chapter in which he has illustrated works by Dante, Paul Bowles and Enrique Juncosa, among others. Miquel Barceló's early interest in art comes from his mother, a painter in the tradition of Mallorcan landscape; His first real breakthrough came when he travelled to Paris in 1974 and discovered the paintings of Paul Klee and 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 modelling classes at the School of Decorative Arts in Palma de Mallorca, and shortly afterwards he enrolled in the Sant Jordi School of Fine Arts in Barcelona, ​​although he barely attended classes during the first few months. His self-taught training was decisive, however: he read all kinds of works voraciously and gradually began to explore the paintings of Lucio Fontana, Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, among other prominent artists. In 1976 he took part 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 canvases covered in paint in Mallorca to which he incorporated organic elements. Later he experimented with thick layers of paint on canvases that he exposed to the elements to provoke spontaneous physical and chemical reactions, such as oxidation or cracking, which left the insides of the painting exposed. He never abandoned his experimentation with organic materials and forms taken from nature. His participation in the Sâo Paulo Biennial (1981) and in the Documenta VII in Kassel (1982) launched him onto the international art scene in his youth. The main museums and galleries of the world began to demand him and his paintings achieved a very high price, unusual for an artist of his age. Important awards arrived with equal haste: in 1986 he won the National Prize for Plastic Arts, 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 marks on his painting. In 1992 he secretly married Cecile, a Dutch literary specialist, 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 girl who was named Marcela María Celia. The couple lives in their home-studio 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 of the cathedral of Palma de Mallorca, which recreates the miracle of the loaves and fishes. In November 2008, the decoration of the dome of Room XX of the United Nations Palace in Geneva, baptised as the "Room of Human Rights and the Alliance of Civilisations", was presented to the public. This work, which covers 1,600 square metres and cost 20 million euros, can only be appreciated by the spectator in fragments, due to its large surface area; 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 a neo-expressionist nature and of overflowing imagination, of dense material presence and immense plastic richness.