Modest Cuixart - European Contemporary Art

Modest Cuixart  (1925-2007)

"Painter, draftsman, printmaker and scenographer Spanish. He was born in Barcelona on November 2, 1925 and passed away in Palamós (Girona) on October 31, 2007.In 1944 he joined the Faculty of medicine, but abandoned it in 1946 to devote himself completely to painting. In 1948 he participated in the founding of the magazine Dau al set and in the Group of the same name, being the first and most important manifestation of Spanish surrealism of post-war linking innovative movements after the war with the avant-garde of the first third of the century, together with Arnau Puig, Joan Brossa, Tharrats and Tàpies. Two years later, took part in the "second week of art" organized by the "School of Altamira", where he became friends with Willi Baumeister, Lloréns Artigas, Luis Felipe Vivanco and Ricardo Gullón, among others.In 1951 he travelled to France, alternating her residence between Lyon and Paris. His first paintings and drawings, in the Decade of the 1940s, are assigned to expressionism. Then it went through a surreal stage linked to fantastic and dreamlike, images in the time of "Dau to Set". In the Decade of the fifties evolved into a painting informalist and material that uses the "dripping" and collage, to end up going to a painting which will progressively accentuating of expressionist figuration, with a special interest in the female figure and "erotic" images. Cuixart Antigone of the Ballet Moderne de Paris made a substantial graphic works, as well as decorations and theatrical costumes, including those carried out for the ballet in 1964. In 1958 he won prize Torres García and in 1959 the painting prize of the 'V biennial of São Paulo".The Dau al Set room organized in 1975 a sample retrospective which incorporated his work from the first steps of 1942. Representative pieces of each of the phases crossed by Cuixart, from his time there could see magicista and surrealist of Dau al Set, up to the abarrocada and neomodernista figuration of recent times, passing through his abstract phase of calligrams, "dripping", collages and painting material from mid-1950s, and the period through which blooms materic and the viscous exuberancias of informalism diluted slowly giving space to those sensual presence and obsessive frivolous woman with Hat plant, disturbing allegories of the grim reaper who populate his latest paintings. Despite the incessant changes and fluctuations of the interest of the painter between the materials and the strictly formal, exists in Cuixart a constant that gives unity to the whole of his contribution: the magical element, the use of a hermetic language of symbols, the embodiment of a dark mystery magma; in the words of the poet Joan Perucho: "Cuixart is taca les mans amb the fosca". "(thebiography.us)