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

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

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

The work will be carefully handled and packed in a reinforced cardboard package. 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 dazzlement 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 taking drawing and modeling classes at the Palma de Mallorca School of Decorative Arts, and shortly after he entered the Sant Jordi School of Fine Arts in Barcelona, although he hardly attended classes during the first months; instead, his self-taught training 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 Mec-Mec gallery in 1977; the following year he exhibited in Mallorca canvases covered with paint into which he incorporated organic elements. 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 cuarteamientos (?) that revealed the entrails of the painting. He would never abandon experimentation with organic materials and with forms drawn from nature.
His participation in the São Paulo Biennial (1981) and the Kassel Documenta 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 extraordinarily high price, unusual for an artist of his age. Equally quickly came important awards: in 1986 he won the National Award for Plastic Arts, and in 2003 he received the Prince of Asturias Award for the Arts.
Barceló has lived long periods in Mali, a African country whose light, like the Mediterranean, has left deep traces in his painting. In 1992 he secretly married in Artá to Cecile, a Dutch literature specialist. 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 Sa Devesa de Ferrutx studio-house (Mallorca). In 2002 he created a memorable illustration of Dante’s Divine Comedy, and in 2007 he inaugurated an extraordinary ceramic altarpiece in the Chapel of the Holy of Palma Cathedral, recreating the miracle of bread and fish.
In November 2008 the decoration of the dome of the XX Hall at the United Nations Palace in Geneva was presented to the public, named “Hall of Human Rights and Civilizations Alliance.” This work, covering 1600 square meters and costing 20 million euros, can only be appreciated by the viewer in fragments due to its vast surface; in it the artist gave shape to thousands of underwater stalactites whose collectively evoke a great universal sea.
Baroque painting, art brut, American abstract expressionism, Italian art povera, works of Joan Miró and Antoni Tàpies are among the influences Barceló has transfigured 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 is largely due to the plastic force of his paintings, the originality of the repertoire of characteristic themes, and a technique based on certain resources, such as mastery of aerial perspective, from which he often offers glimpses of spaces difficult to represent and the transition from tiny scales to cosmic scales, 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 taken from the mythical world of another great Mallorcan painter, Joan Miró, we face a cosmogonical 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 great central void. However, some tactile protrusions of the painting appear to project shadows on the canvas suggesting shapes of dragonflies or flying insects, which would place this constellation on the scale of the tiny.
But if we compare those protrusions that, like excrecences, 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 the stones on the ground, of blinding sand, seem to have begun to spin before our eyes. In this painting, the cosmic and the earthly join hands.