Albert Ràfols-Casamada

Albert Ràfols-Casamada (Barcelona 1923) started studying architecture at Barcelona University in 1942. He was a member of the group Els Vuit, exhibiting for the first time with them in Barcelona in 1942. A year later he presented his first solo exhibition, also in Barcelona, at the Galeria Pictoria. After giving up architecture in 1948, he became a student at the Academia Baixas, where he met his future wife, the painter Maria Girona. Three years later he went to live in France, remaining there until 1954, thanks to a grant from the French government. His artistic career began with figurative work and evolved towards an abstraction characterised by the interplay of colour and the creation of a kind of geometrical structure until the late fifties, at which point he introduced a certain chromatic austerity with a predominance of white tones. This change coincided with the appearance of his first collages. Later his work once again began to incorporate realist signs, which played a symbolic and aesthetic role. Ràfols-Casamada’s artistic output has not remained confined to the field of painting, but has naturally branched out into a fruitful dialogue with life and with other arts; in addition to paintings, collages and objects, his oeuvre includes the making of stained glass, theatre sets and graphic work. He has presented over eighty solo exhibitions and has taken part in major joint exhibitions, such as Maestros de la pintura española de hoy (Mexico 1974), Le Siècle de Picasso (Paris 1987) and Naturalezas españolas, 1940—1987 (Madrid 1988). In 1980 he received the National Visual Arts Prize. He has also done important work as a teacher and director at the Elisava and Eina schools, which are devoted particularly to graphic design. He is also the author of various books of poems, such as Notes Nocturnes (1976), Territori de Temps (1979), Angle de Llum (1984), and Els colors de les pedres (1989), and the essay Sobre pintura (1985). The exhibition, a retrospective, commences in the sixties and consists of a selection of paintings and drawings, many of which are exhibited for the first time.