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

Offset lithography by Miquel Barceló (*)
Reproduction of the work “Constelació Nº4” (**) , mixed media of pigments and latex on canvas created by Barceló in 1989
Printed on high-quality thick Art Fine paper (200 g)
Published by Mueso d’Art Espanyol Contemporani of Palma de Mallorca.
Impression authorized 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 kept in a professional art folder, and thus remains in perfect condition).

The work will be carefully handled and packed in reinforced cardboard. Shipping will be insured and tracked.

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.

(*) The early interest of Miquel Barceló in art comes from his mother, a painter in the tradition of Mallorcan landscape; his first dazzlement occurred when he travelled to Paris in 1974 and discovered the painting 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 of Palma de Mallorca, and shortly after entered the Sant Jordi School of Fine Arts in Barcelona, although he hardly attended classes during the first months; instead, self-taught training proved decisive: he read voraciously 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 the 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 canvases covered with paint into which organic elements were incorporated. Later he experimented with thick layers of paint on canvases exposed to the elements, to provoke spontaneous physical and chemical reactions, such as oxidation or tremblings, that 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 Kassel Documenta VII (1982) propelled him onto the international art scene in his youth. Major museums and galleries around the world began to claim him and his paintings reached an extremely high market value, unusual for an artist of his age. Similarly rapid came important awards: in 1986 he won the National Plastic Arts Award, and in 2003 he would receive the Prince of Asturias Award for the Arts.
Barceló has spent long periods in Mali, an African country whose light, like the Mediterranean, has left deep traces in his painting. In 1992 he secretly married Cecile, a Dutch literature specialist, in Artà. 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 Most Blessed in Palma Cathedral, recreating the miracle of bread and fish.
In November 2008 the decoration of the dome of Room XX of the United Nations Palace in Geneva was presented to the public, named the “Human Rights and Civilizations’ Alliance Room.” This work, which covers 1600 square meters and cost 20 million euros, can only be appreciated by the viewer in fragments due to its vast size; in it, the artist shaped thousands of underwater stalactites that together evoke a great universal sea.
Barceló’s work draws on Baroque painting, art brut, American abstract expressionism, Italian art povera, the works of Joan Miró and Antoni Tàpies, which he has transformed into a formidable personal synthesis of neo-expressionist nature and boundless imagination, with dense material presence and immense plastic richness.

(**) The enormous international success achieved by Miquel Barceló owes much to the plastic force of his paintings, to the originality of his characteristic themes, and to a technique based on certain resources, such as mastery of aerial perspective, from which he usually offers pinched visions of spaces difficult to represent and the passage from tiny scales to cosmic ones, showing objects of immediate presence as well as immense places, like the sea that has no concrete limits.
In the case of Constel·ació 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 cosmogonic space, without limits or references to a specific place or a determined scale, in which everything seems to revolve around a large white hole, as if planets or stars forming a milky constellation around a large central void. However, some materical protuberances of the painting seem to cast shadows on the canvas suggesting forms of dragonflies or flying insects, which would place this constellation in the realm of the tiny.
But if we compare those protuberances that, like excremental growths, populate the canvas with those appearing in La flaque, we could interpret this space as the consequence of a mirage produced by desert light, where stones on the ground, of blinding sand, seem to have started spinning before our eyes. In this painting, the cosmic and the earthly hand in hand.