Mayoral

Antoni Tàpies i Puig, (Barcelona, 1923 - 2012) was a prominent Catalan artist renowned for his profound contributions to the field of contemporary art. Tàpies began his artistic journey at an early age and quickly established himself as a pioneer of the avant-garde movement. His distinctive style embraced elements of abstract expressionism, informalism, and mixed media, creating a unique visual language that challenged traditional artistic norms.

Tàpies explored profound themes of human existence, spirituality, and social consciousness through his artworks, often incorporating everyday objects and symbolic materials into his textured and tactile compositions. His work encompassed a wide range of mediums, including painting, sculpture, printmaking, and ceramics, and he was celebrated for his ability to convey emotional depth and introspection through his powerful and thought-provoking pieces. Throughout his career, Tàpies received numerous international accolades, and his work is part of the most prestigious museums in the world, solidifying his status as one of the most influential artists of the 20th century.

CV

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Antonio Saura (Huesca, 1930 – Cuenca, 1998) was a prominent Spanish painter and sculptor known for his profound and provocative works that explored themes of human suffering, anguish, and existentialism. Saura's artistic journey began with figurative expressionism before evolving into a distinctive style characterized by bold brushstrokes, distorted figures, and a haunting use of black and white. Drawing inspiration from artists like Francisco Goya and Pablo Picasso, Saura's oeuvre often delved into the depths of the human psyche, reflecting his own personal struggles and the sociopolitical climate of his time. Through his powerful visual language, Saura's art sought to confront and challenge viewers, leaving an indelible mark on the Spanish art scene and establishing him as a revered figure in modern art history.

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Eulàlia Grau (Tarrasa, 1946)

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Jean-Michel Basquiat (New York, 1960 - 1988) was an American artist who rose to success during the 1980s as part of the Neo-expressionism movement. Basquiat first achieved notoriety in the late 1970s as part of the graffiti duo SAMO, writing enigmatic epigrams all over Manhattan, particularly where rap, punk, and street art coalesced into hip-hop culture. By the early 1980s, his paintings were being exhibited in galleries and museums internationally. At 21, Basquiat became the youngest artist to ever take part in Documenta in Kassel, Germany. At 22, he became one of the youngest to exhibit at the Whitney Biennial in NY.

Basquiat's art focused on dichotomies such as wealth versus poverty, integration versus segregation, and inner versus outer experience. He appropriated poetry, drawing, and painting; he married text and image, abstraction, figuration, and historical information mixed with contemporary critique. He used social commentary in his paintings as a tool for introspection and for identifying with the black community, as well as attacks on power structures and racism.

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José Pérez Ocaña (Cantillana, 1947 - Seville, 1983), better known as ‘‘la Ocaña’’, was an artist, performer and activist for LGTBI+ rights.

In 1971 he moved to Barcelona, where he worked as a decorative painter to survive and developed his artistic life. Ocaña was one of the main figures of the Barcelona counterculture movement in the 1970s. 
He used his symbolic representations of the body to provoke, and at the same time to naturalize, making them visible in the public space, a set of popular and collective performative practices of gender and sexual disobedience. His great popularity continues to conceal his work as an artist, an original practice which announced —30 years in advance— an exemplary model of creating art for the 21st century.

Ocaña incorporated numerous elements of Andalusian popular religiosity into his aesthetics, resignifying them as countercultural elements and giving them centrality in his works and also in his exhibitions. In cinema, he starred in Ocaña, retrato intermitente (1978), directed by Ventura Pons; in the film Manderley (1981), directed by Jesús Garay, and in the short film Silencis (1982), among others.

Mari Chordà (Amposta, 1942) is a Catalan painter, poet and feminist activist. She studied at the Escola de Belles Arts de Barcelona, where she began to experiment with pictorial representations of the female body. In 1964 —a few years before the feminist art revolution that took place in the United States in the early 1970s— Chordà started her Vagines series, focusing on the visual representation of femininity from a physiological perspective. Her pictorial style became richer in colour and covered themes such as sexuality and maternity, as a result of her experience of pregnancy after a stay in Paris in 1965. She created groundbreaking depictions of the female body in a “non-figurative” style, anticipating the feminist avant-garde of the following decade.

Chordà took an active part in feminist movements from the late 1960s onwards. In 1968 she founded the cultural centre “Lo Llar” in her native city. In 1977 she co-founded the legendary Bar-Biblioteca- Feminista “laSal” in Barcelona and the first feminist publishing house in Spain.

Marria Pratts (Barcelona, 1988), is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice gives off an uninhibited and spontaneous spirit. Although Pratts studied Graphic Design at Escola Massana in Barcelona, she is primarily self-taught. Her exploration of various artistic mediums, including drawing, painting, sculpture, carpets, furniture, and fanzines, demonstrates her commitment to plastic experimentation. Using a vibrant and optimistic palette, Marria draws inspiration from elements found in her neighborhood in Hospitalet de Llobregat (Barcelona).

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Martina Pla (Barcelona, 1962), whose father was a designer and painter, and whose mother was a painter, is a creator of clothing and a fortune teller. She works on the spontaneous drawing of the subconscious, inseparable from her intense biography and from her surrounding landscape. 

From the end of 1970 to the end of 1990, her work was displayed in various group exhibitions and she collaborated with the galleries Fernando Alcolea and Sala Parés. Starting from 2000, she distanced herself from the world of exhibitions and devoted herself to transforming her previous painted work to oil, deconstructing it to reconstruct it, creating compositional synergies in exhibition spaces. In this respect, in 2022 she presented the project “biology of the landscape”, in which nature and the environment are stimuli for pictorial creation.

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