Miquel Barceló (after) - Constelació Nº4 - Offset Lithography - Licensed print

Offset lithography after Miquel Barceló (*)
Reproduction of the artwork “Constelació Nº4” (**), mixed media of pigments and latex on canvas created by Barceló in 1989
Printed on thick, high-quality Art Fine paper (200g)
Published by Mueso d’Art Espanyol Contemporani de Palma de Mallorca.
Authorized print with copyright and legal serial number.
Large format.

- Sheet dimensions: 68 x 68 cm
- Condition: Excellent (this work has never been framed or exhibited, always stored in a professional art folder, and therefore in perfect condition).

The work will be carefully handled and packed in reinforced cardboard packaging. The shipment will be traceable with a tracking number.

The shipment will also include transport insurance for the final value of the work with full reimbursement in case of loss or damage, at no cost to the buyer.

(*) Miquel Barceló’s early interest in art comes from his mother, a painter in the Mallorcan landscape tradition; his first fascination occurred when he traveled to Paris in 1974 and discovered the paintings of Paul Klee, Jean Dubuffet, and the works of art brut in general, which would have a lasting impact on him.
That same year he began attending drawing and modeling classes at the School of Decorative Arts in Palma de Mallorca, and shortly after he entered the Sant Jordi School of Fine Arts in Barcelona, although he scarcely attended classes during the early months; instead, his self-taught education proved decisive: he voraciously read all kinds of works and gradually explored the paintings of Lucio Fontana, Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, and Willem de Kooning, among other prominent artists.
In 1976 he participated in happenings and protest actions of the Taller Llunàtic group, and with them he held his first exhibition in Barcelona, at the Mec-Mec gallery, in 1977; the following year he exhibited in Mallorca fabrics covered with paint into which he incorporated organic elements. Later he experimented with thick layers of paint on canvases subjected to the outdoors, to provoke spontaneous physical and chemical reactions, such as oxidation or crusting, which revealed the guts of the painting. He would never abandon experimentation with organic materials and forms drawn from nature.
His participation in the São Paulo Biennial (1981) and in Documenta Kassel VII (1982) propelled him onto the international art scene in his youth. The world’s major museums and galleries began to claim him, and his paintings reached an exceptionally high market value, unusual for an artist of his age. Equally quickly followed important awards: in 1986 he won the National Plastic Arts Award, and in 2003 he received the Prince of Asturias Award for the Arts.
Barceló has lived for long periods in Mali, a African country whose light, like that of the Mediterranean, has left deep marks on his painting. In 1992 he secretly married in Artá to Cecile, a Dutch specialist in literature. Months later, in August of that year, he became a father for the first time when his wife gave birth in Mallorca to a girl named Marcela María Celia. The couple resides in his house-studio in Sa Devesa de Ferrutx (Mallorca). In 2002 he produced a memorable illustration of Dante’s Divine Comedy, and in 2007 he inaugurated an extraordinary ceramic altarpiece in the chapel of the Holy of the cathedral of Palma de Mallorca, recreating the miracle of the loaves and fishes.
In November 2008 the decoration of the dome of Room XX of the United Nations Palace in Geneva was unveiled, named the “Human Rights and Civilizations’ Alliance Room.” This work, covering 1600 square meters and costing 20 million euros, can only be appreciated by the viewer fragmentarily due to its vast surface; in it, the artist gave form to thousands of marine stalactites that together evoke a great universal sea.
Baroque painting, art brut, North American abstract expressionism, Italian Arte Povera, the works of Joan Miró and Antoni Tàpies are among the influences Barceló has transfigured into a formidable personal synthesis of neo-expressionist kind and boundless imagination, with dense material presence and immense plastic richness.

(**) The enormous international success achieved by Miquel Barceló is largely due to the plastic force of his paintings, the originality of his characteristic themes, and a technique based on certain resources, such as mastery of aerial perspective, from which he tends to offer pinched views of spaces difficult to represent and the passage from minuscule scales to cosmic ones, showing both objects of immediate presence and vast places, such as the sea that has no concrete limits.
In the case of Constel·lació núm. 4 (Forat blanc), a word that seems drawn from the mythical world of another great Mallorcan painter, Joan Miró, we are confronted with a cosmogonical space, without limits or references to a specific place or a determined scale, in which everything seems to revolve around a great white hole, as if planets or stars formed a milky constellation around a central void. However, some material protrusions of the painting appear to cast shadows on the canvas suggesting forms of dragonflies or flying insects, which would place this constellation on the scale of the tiny.
But if we compare those protrusions that, like excretions, populate the canvas with those that appear in La flaque, we could interpret this space as the consequence of a mirage produced by desert light, where the stones on the ground, of blinding sand, seem to have started to spin before our eyes. In this painting, the cosmic and the earthly shake hands.