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)

Jorge Oteiza Embil - Space and Emptiness

"Jorge Oteiza Embil, Basque sculptor (born Oct. 21, 1908, Orio, Spain—died April 9, 2003, San Sebastián, Spain), examined the nature of space and emptiness in monumental minimalist sculptures that were influential in the art world of the mid-20th century. Oteiza began sculpting while studying medicine in Madrid. In 1935–48 he lived in South America, and the pre-Columbian art that he saw there informed his later work. Oteiza won the grand prize for sculpture at the 1957 São Paulo (Braz.) Bienal, but in 1959 he announced his retirement from sculpting. He continued to create small sculptures, however, in addition to publishing books on art theory and volumes of poetry. Orteiza’s frieze for the Aránzazu Basilica in Spain’s Guipúzcoa province, commissioned in 1950, aroused opposition but was finally completed in 1969. He was awarded the Spanish Medal of Fine Arts (1985), the Prince of Asturias Art Prize (1988), and the Gold Medal of Navarre (1992)."(britannica.com)

Jose Balmes - Art Informel

José Balmes Parramón (20 January 1927 – 28 August 2016 ) was a Spanish-born painter based in Chile. He received Chile's National Prize for Plastic Arts in 1999.
José Balmes was born in 1927 in the town of Montesquiu in Catalonia, where he spent his childhood until the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936. Three years later, after the Nationalist victory, Balmes with his family was forced to leave Spain due to the militancy of his father, Damià Balmes, who was mayor of the town for the Republican Left of Catalonia.
Along with Gracia Barrios and other artists, he would form the informalist group Signo, with whom he would present works in Barcelona, Madrid, and Paris.
Of known communist militancy, and having been for several periods a member of the Communist Party's Central Committee,[3] a large part of Balmes' career was linked to political life, actively supporting the Popular Unity government led by Salvador Allende, and having to leave for exile in France after the 1973 coup d'état.There he continued developing his artistic career as a professor at Pantheon-Sorbonne University.In 1986, Balmes returned to Chile, after which he received multiple awards, such as the 1999 National Prize for Plastic Arts and the 2002 Altazor.
In 2012 the Chilean filmmaker Pablo Trujillo Novoa shot a documentary about the life of the artist entitled Balmes: El doble exilio de la pintura (Balmes: Painting's Double Exile).Wikipedia

Joan Brotat

Joan Brotat (1920–1990) was a painter born in Barcelona. He studied at the School of Arts and Trades of Barcelona and his work was first exhibited at one cycle of experimental art organised in 1950. Before his first exhibition, Brotat had a brief period of Informalism and experimentation with collages and gestual art. He also cultivated a post-modernist painting style with conventional themes, but in 1949 his work began to take on a personal primitivist as a reinvention of Romanesque Catalan painting. Brotat abandoned all experimental concern for new non-figurative forms of expression and became the painter of melancholy faces. The personal papers of Joan Brotat are preserved in the Biblioteca de Catalunya.Wikipedia