Antoni Clavé
(Barcelona, 1913-Saint Tropez, 2005) Spanish painter and sculptor.A disciple of the sculptor Ángel Ferrant and the painter José Mongrell, he began painting at the School of Fine Arts in Barcelona and his foray into the professional field was produced through poster design, mainly cinematographic.Affiliated with the Republican Army during the Spanish Civil War, in January 1939 he went into exile to France, where he spent time in a refugee camp.He continued his pictorial activities, forming, together with a group of Spanish painters, the so-called School of Paris.
In 1941 he set up his first Montparnasse studio.His emotional stability and the birth of his son gave rise to a series of intimate paintings, some of them tending towards abstraction.It did not take long for him to produce paintings with a marked expressionist and even cubist character, in which he systematically and especially dealt with the collage technique, from which the assemblages later derived.
He exhibited for the first time in Paris in 1949; since then his name appears in the Parisian Autumn and General Society of Fine Arts salons, and also in Rome, Stockholm, Geneva, Copenhagen, London and Nice.The culmination of his recognition as a renowned painter came in 1978, when the Museum of Modern Art of the Villa de Paris dedicated a large retrospective that included painting, collage and large tapestries from 1958 to 1979.
Clavé also entered the field of sculpture from a young age, led by Ferrant.Some pieces are based on found and recontextualized objects (influenced by Miró); on other occasions he makes boxes, cabinets and reliquaries, especially in wood, based on assembled and polychrome pieces that maintain at the same time the ambiguity of the sculptural and the pictorial.Within this land, the small bronzes stand out, where the sequel to the millenary sculptures of Mediterranean tradition is evident, whose protagonist is the symbol of fertility, represented in the mother goddesses, whom the Barcelona artist turns into nurses or queens.
His style is between expressionism and symbolism; In his painting, the invention and drawing quality are remarkable, as well as the exuberance of his coloring and the rich texture of the materials, characteristics also applicable to his sculptural work.In 1989 he presented a retrospective exhibition of his sculptures at the Palau de la Virreina in Barcelona, which included works made from 1939 to 1986.A year later, in 1990, he opened an anthological exhibition with all his paintings at the Palau Robert in Barcelona , organized by the Generalitat of Catalonia.And in April 1999 he opened an exhibition at the Centro Cultural del Conde Duque de Madrid, mainly focused on the pictorial production of the first three decades.
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