L’IVAM A LES ARTS

Pablo Palazuelo (Madrid 1916-2007), painter and sculptor, he is one of the important representatives of the Spanish modern art. He is an artist that chose early the abstraction, and his work was one of the scarce modern approaches that became evident in a period of special plastic tension in Spain. His singular poetry, influenced at the beginning by cubism, Klee and Kandinsky, subscribed and linked to the most creative formulations of the classic avant-garde.

In Palazuelo the kind of representation consists of flat structures that configurate progressively more complex and enigmatic geometries. The conjunction of lines and pure planes does not try to generate optical illusions. His work wants to express continuously the conjunction of reason and emotion, by means of a language that is very much based on numerology.

Pedro Cabrita Reis (Lisbon 1956) is one of the most important Portuguese artists from the last twenty years.

Pedro Cabrita’s search resolves in a sum of fragments, urban rests and domestic materials saved from daily universe, objects that follow the memory, full of secret meanings, that evoke a personal and private universe and whose references are never literal or univocal but ambiguous and polysemic.

The simplicity of forms and materials is an essential characteristic of his creations, but behind this apparent simplicity, his work hides a multiform richness that in a subtle and restrained manner, recreates his own universe and addresses transcendental subjects unaware of any pretentiousness. This reduction to what is essential is combined with a monumental vocation that picks up the sense of the monument as mark of passage of time and testimony of the human life, trying to recover the fascination for architecture and the mystery of the object.

Born in 1946 in Paris, Alain Kirili lives and works between this city and New York. His sculpture brings up to date the traditional materials such as terracota, molten iron, painted plaster or bronze, and transforms contemporary materials such as aluminum or resin.

In 1972 when he did his first sculptures in zinc, iron and terracota, he used different combinations of mixed techniques. In 1975 he changed to iron and forge and it became obvious the fascination that Kirili feels for the rich and traditional process of forge and the importance of craft work. The first iron sculptures are the result of a formally manipulated method that reminds the idea of Julio González of “drawing in the space”. Fan of him and of David Smith, both artists influence a lot his iron works. The diversity of milieux and the spiritual dimension of his activity are also one of his characteristics as one can notice in his collaborations with American jazz musicians.

Born in Liberec (Bohemia) 60 years ago, Markus Lüpertz belongs to a generation of German artists that suffered the economical and ideological reconstruction of the post-war period in Germany. Together with Baselitz, Penck, lnmendorf, Kiefer and the Danish Kirkeby, among others, Lüpertz creates an artistic corpus, capable of being the big epic poem of the German people in the post-war period. “The essential motivation in art is a permanent estate of conflict. And the fight against death is the most important conflict that an artist has to face, consciously or not”, says Lüpertz.

All the work by Markus Lüpertz is, not only a stratums and scars archeology of history of art but also, at the same time, a memory of the subjects that have invaded our collective imaginary. Painter of painters, of cult quotes and references, his work is a combination of intertextuality, memory and form.

Born in 1930, the Rumanian artist with Swiss nationality, Daniel Spoerri has developed an important artistic activity in the field of assembly and collage applied to painting and sculpture.

Following the Dadá movement, Spoerri has expanded the nonretinal creation processes sketched by the New Realists, updating the spirit of the Kurt Schwitters’s collages. By accumulating and inventorying, he shows interest in the paradox that is produced between the subject and the technique, approaching different aspects of the human existence. He places in first position what belongs to everyday life, in order to reveal the poetic burden over which he projects a look full of humor, mixing the genders and the senses (sight, smell, touch) to help changing the reality.