Through March 6, 2022
Miquel Barceló
Miquel Barceló
Miquel Barceló
Acquavella Galleries is pleased to present an exhibition of new works by internationally acclaimed artist Miquel Barceló. The exhibition includes a selection of the artist’s recent paintings and ceramics, for the most part dating to 2020, when the artist was confined to the island of Mallorca during the pandemic. The artist’s third exhibition with the gallery and first solo presentation in the United States outside of New York, the show will be on view February 5 through March 6, 2022 at Acquavella’s Palm Beach location.
Barceló was born in Felanitx in southeast Mallorca in 1957, and the island has had an important and enduring influence on the artist’s life and work. Though he has always returned to his native Mallorca, for the past three decades Barceló has also journeyed across the globe and drawn inspiration from time spent in diverse and varying locations.
Though he has experimented with a wide range of materials, subjects, and highly diverse cultural references in his work over the years, his art always reflects a deeply rooted connection with the natural world, particularly the textures and materiality of the earth and the ever-changing colors of the sea. Barceló has repeatedly painted the surface of the sea and has also plumbed its mysterious depths in his work, drawing from his love for fishing and deep sea diving.
“I like this kind of irony that painters, for several millennia at least, have tried to represent the sea. This thing that changes all the time and is never the same; it’s infinite, and each time new, and each time necessary. That’s what is beautiful. It seems to be a banality and yet it’s a profound necessity.”
- Miquel Barceló
For the past thirty years, ceramics have also been an integral part of the artist’s oeuvre; he began experimenting with the medium when he was living in Mali in the early 1990s, adopting the ancient Dogon techniques from the Neolithic period to make earthenware works. Barceló has continued his work with ceramics in Mallorca, where he has transformed a former brick factory at Vilafranca de Bonany into a ceramics studio, where he molds, fires, and paints a variety of distinctive forms. Their shapes feature unusual contours and topography, molded by the artist’s touch. Painted with brightly rendered maritime and earthly creatures, many of these works reflect the artist’s lifelong fascination with paleolithic cave paintings, their painted surfaces recalling the proliferation of animals found on the walls of prehistoric caves. The walls of Barceló's ceramics studio are covered with thinned-down clay into which the artist has drawn and smeared images in his own type of contemporary cave painting.
La mer cadmium, 2020
Mixed media on canvas
31 7/8 x 39 3/8 inches (81 x 100 cm)
Grand naufrage de petits bateaux, 2020
Mixed media on canvas
66 7/8 x 106 3/8 inches (170 x 270 cm)
Plat de toros, 2020
Ceramic
18 1/8 x 18 1/8 x 2 inches (46 x 46 x 5 cm)
Llagosteria, 2020
Mixed media on canvas
63 x 94 1/2 inches (160 x 240 cm)
Un devant, 2020
Mixed media on canvas
38 1/8 x 78 1/8 inches (97 x 198.5 cm)
Petit naufrage de grands bateaux, 2020
Mixed media on canvas
28 7/8 x 39 3/8 inches (73.5 x 100 cm)
Card vermell, 2020
Ceramic
15 3/4 x 12 x 12 1/4 inches (40 x 30.5 x 31 cm)
“When we tap on the fresh clay, it is directly the sound of flesh… I’ve used clay as a branch of my painting… Clay becomes flesh, and the flesh becomes mineral, the true metamorphosis of clay is this soft matter which with fire becomes stone.”
- Miquel Barceló
All studio photos by François Halard, all works of art by Miquel Barceló are © 2022 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.
