MOISÉS VILLÈLIA
Barcelona, (Spain) 1928 – Barcelona, (Spain) 1994   
His training was connected with his apprenticeship to learn wood carving, his father being a well-known cabinet-maker who had moved to Mataró in 1942 in order to run a furniture factory and then, in 1945, open a workshop with his son, in which they worked on religious commissions. His first solo exhibition took place at the Museu Municipal de Mataró in 1954, after which he broke away from the Expressionist figuration that had characterised his work and, together with other artists, founded the group Art Actual, through which he met Joan Brossa, who introduced him to Dau al Set and the Barcelona scene. Financial needs led him to experiment with organic materials, such as pumpkins and onion stems. In 1956 and 1957 he participated in the ninth and tenth editions of the Salón de Octubre, and he made his first sculpture out of cane, a material that was to become his main medium of expression. In 1958 he exhibited at the Sala Gaspar, in 1959 in Mataró, where his work was seen by Miró, Sweeney and Pierre Matisse at the urging of Prats and Ángel Ferrant became interested in his work. Ferrant and Calder were aknowledged influences on his aesthetics. He began to do work for architects, and in 1960 he again exhibited his work in Mataró. In 1964 he temporarily gave up cane in order to tackle more resistant materials, such as asbestos cement or concrete. He also designed gardens, such as R. Gomis’s La Ricarda, which also became the name of a series of works produced that year. From 1967 to 1969 he lived in Paris, where he produced a substantial collection of drawings, such as the ones in the series Ligne de Sceaux (Line of Seals) and the book Segmentaciones. In 1969 he went to Buenos Aires to spend some time with his brother, subsequently going on to Quito, where he co-directed the Galería Siglo XX and became interested in Pre-Colombian art, taking part in various excavations. At the end of 1971 he returned to Catalonia and settled in Molló, a small town in the Pyrenees, although he continued visiting his friends in Barcelona. In 1972 he worked on the series Estratigrafías (Stratigraphs) and Semillas de Manglar (Mangrove Seeds). Two years later the first monograph on his work was published and he exhibited at the Sala Gaspar. In the seventies and eighties he continued working on the expressive possibilities of cane and combining it with other materials such as ceramics (1986), and also on developing new series, such as Tela de araña (Cobweb, 1992-93), until the last days of his life in 1994. Various selective exhibitions were held during this period, at the Fundació Joan Miró (1983), Espais (1990) and the IVAM (1999).