"We are music and we paint its trace"
Biografia
Frederic Amat (Barcelona, 1952) is a Catalan visual artist and stage designer whose pictorial production, which began in the 1970s, brings object elements into dialogue with material work that often refers to symbols and a context of mystery. He studied set design and architecture with the teacher and mentor Fabià Puigserver. He understands and practices painting as a porous medium that goes through multiple disciplines. Under the influence of Antoni Tàpies and Joan Miró, Amat uses colors for an expressive purpose, subjecting his canvases to a manipulation process in which he uses all kinds of techniques: collage, assemblage or varnish, among others. In the late 1970s, he made several trips to Africa and North America where he discovered his interest in the performing arts.
Since the mid-1980s, Amat has created sets for dance and theater based on texts by literary authors such as García Lorca, Samuel Beckett, Juan Goytisolo, Bernard-Marie Koltès and Octavio Paz, among others. He has also created stage spaces for opera and oratorios, has illustrated literary works such as The Thousand and One Nights or L'Odissea and has directed film projects such as Viatge a la lluna (1998) and Foc al càntir (2000). His interventions in architectural spaces, whether natural or urban, combine painting, sculpture and ceramics.
In 2007 he was awarded the National Prize for Visual Arts of Catalonia, granted by the Generalitat, in recognition of the exhibition held at the Carles Taché Gallery, where he brought together all of his work: paintings, sculptures and multimedia montages. His works have starred in interesting retrospectives, such as those held at the Tamayo Museum (Mexico), at the Miró Foundation in Barcelona or at the Instituto de América in Santa Fe (Granada), and today they are part of the collections, among others, of the Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona, Thyssen Museum and Fundació Vila Casas.
In 2018 we presented in the Artur Ramon Art space a selection of his works that dialogued with the gallery background to weave some visual correspondences as a cabinet of curiosities or "Wunderkammer".
