Miquel Barceló
RACCOLTA DI POLVERE (DUST COLLECTION)
12 March – 30 April 2002
Paolo Curti & Co.
Tues – Sat 11.00-19.00 closed Sundays and holidays
via Pontaccio 19
20121 Milano Italy
T. +39 02 86998170
www.paolocurti.com
The opening of the exhibition by Miquel Barceló will be held on Tuesday 12 March at 18.30 at the Paolo Curti & Co. gallery.
Born in Felanitx, Majorca in 1957, after two years at the School of Arts and Crafts of Palma Barceló entered the Fine Arts Academy of Barcelona in 1974. In 1975 he returned to Majorca and joined the conceptual art group “Taller lunatic”, participating in the creation of its magazine “Neon Suro”. During the 1980s he traveled in Europe, the United States and West Africa. Today Miquel Barceló lives in Paris, Majorca and Segou, Mali.
The reference reality of Barceló is complex and detailed, based on an intertwining of Majorcan ethnographic elements, African skeletal primitivism and the opaque, precarious modernity of Paris. The various relationships Barceló establishes among forms and objects indicate that he does not paint objects as such, but rather the differences between them, together with the emotions they reawaken inside him. Barceló paints imagined, dreamt and pondered objects with the painterly means of a material he has gradually developed, in which technical breakthroughs are always accompanied by new forms. The exhibition features nine canvases of different sizes and five large works on paper made by the artist in Mali in 1999-2000. Sand, animal bones, elements of the African land become part of the work in this continuing process of aesthetic and formal innovation.
Miquel Barceló has shown his work in some of the world’s most important museums, including the Boston Institute of Contemporary Art, the Museum of Modern Art of New York, the Centro de Arte Reina Sofia of Madrid and the Centre Georges Pompidou of Paris. He has participated at Documenta, Kassel and the Venice Art Biennial. In May his works will be shown at the Fondation Maeght of St. Paul de Vence.
For more information go to: www.paolocurti.com