Miquel Barcelo

Miquel Barcelo paints, draws, and sculpts artworks that are heavily influenced by his nomadic lifestyle and attachment to classical painting. In the 1970s he rallied with Taller Lunatic, a group of conceptual artists in Mallorca, after Spain’s political uprising. Inspired to experience and create his own delayed version of the avant-garde, he was influenced by Jackson Pollock, Jean Debuffet’s anarchy, Art Brut, and classical painters like Diego Velazquez. His early works explored matter and decomposition, using thick paint and mixed media to juxtapose organic and inorganic materials. His extensive international travel in the 1980s led him to West Africa, where the scorched land, rocky landscape, and idyllic seascape seeped into his memory of home. Elements of the environment, such as local dirt from Mali he mixed into pigments or termites that collaborated with him to generate a series of drawings, make their way into his work and visualize his transience. Barcelo channels his memory of the terrain he’s traversed into a redefinition of the formal and thematic experiments that defined art from 19th and 20th centuries.

Barcelo has been commissioned for a number of public artworks including the Mallorca Cathedral and the UN’s Palace of Nations in Geneva, Switzerland, among others. He has exhibited internationally since the 1980s—institutions including the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, Jeu de Paume, Paris, Museu d’Art Contemporary de Barcelona, Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, and the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin. He participated in the São Paulo Biennial in 1981 and dOCUMENTA 7 in 1982. Barcelo was the youngest contemporary artist to ever show at the Louvre Museum in Paris in 2004, and represented Spain in the 2009 Venice Biennale. Additionally he has been granted a number of awards including the Premio Sorolla in 2007 by the Hispanic Society of America, the Gran Premio AECA for the best international artist alive represented at ARCO'03 in 2003, and the Premio Nacional de Artes Plásticas de España in 1986.