Josep Bau (XX) - NO RESERVE - Bodegón hiperrealista con huevo

It is signed by the artist at the bottom, and on the back, it is signed again and titled.

The work is presented framed.

Good condition of the painting.

Work measurements: 35 x 46 cm

Frame size: 60 x 67 cm

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Artist biography

Josep Bau was an imaginary painter born in 1942 in a small industrial town in Catalonia, within a working-class family with limited ties to the art world. From childhood, he showed an almost obsessive fascination with copying from life the everyday objects he found in his home kitchen: glasses, plates, eggs, or fruits arranged on the table. That early fascination with shiny surfaces and reflections would shape his entire subsequent career.

In the 1960s, he studied at the Barcelona School of Fine Arts, where he came into contact with the informalist and conceptual currents that dominated the environment. However, Bau felt detached from those trends and decided to follow a personal path based on meticulous drawing and an oil technique built up through multiple glazes. While many of his contemporaries bet on abstraction, he patiently worked on still lifes with almost photographic precision, which earned him the nickname of 'domestic hyperrealist painter'.

His iconography focused on very sober scenes: a freshly cracked egg on a white plate, an empty glass against a black background, a spoon, a simple piece of bread, or an orange illuminated by a raking light. In his paintings, more than the object itself, what mattered was the silence surrounding it and the tension between fragility and permanence, between the shine of glass and the soft matter of food. This poetics of the minimal led some critics to associate him with the Spanish still life tradition, but updated to the cold and precise language of hyperrealism.

From the 1980s onwards, he exhibited regularly in galleries in Barcelona, Valencia, and Madrid, and participated in several art fairs, although he never achieved widespread fame. His paintings, very laborious, were produced in small series and were appreciated by collectors who valued their serenity and exquisite technical finish. In the last years of his life, troubled by vision problems, he reduced the size of his works and focused on even more refined, almost ascetic compositions, where the black background and the reflection of the object became the protagonists.

Josep Bau passed away in the 21st century, leaving behind a relatively small but highly coherent body of hyper-realistic still life paintings. Today, his figure could be understood as that of a cult artist, discreet and reserved, who chose to view the most humble objects of the domestic environment with poetic intensity. His canvases, with their silent atmosphere and almost surgical precision, remind us that even a simple egg on a plate can become a subject worthy of prolonged contemplation.