MIQUEL BARCELÓ

Miquel Barceló (born Felanitx, 1957) is a painter, sculptor and ceramist. In 1974, he was admitted to Palma de Mallorca’s Fine Arts School, before joining Barcelona’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts of Saint George. In 1976, he was involved in the happenings and protests of Taller Llunatic, an avant-garde conceptual group. In the early 80’s, the first figurative images, started to emerge in his painting in the form of columns of smoke, books and zoomorphic figures. When invited to take part in Documenta 7, Kassel by Rudi Fuchs in 1982, he started to emerge on the international scene: his discovery of Africa in 1988 marked the start of new technical experiments based on local pigments and sediments. From then on, Barceló shared his time between Paris, Mallorca and Mali. After 1993, sculpture–in plaster, bronze or ceramics–took on an increasingly important place in his work, with terracotta becoming a preferred material for his artistic experimentation. In February 2007, Barceló’s work in the Sant Pere chapel at Palma de Mallorca cathedral was inaugurated, closely followed by his work for the Human Rights Room in the Palace of Nations (2008) in Geneva. In 2009, the Spanish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale was entirely dedicated to his work. On the border between tradition and modernity, his expressionist, baroque and syncretic work merges inspirations from literature, the expression of time immemorial and artistic legacy, from Miró to Pollock.