Subirachs. In essenceSculpture and drawing. 1952-2002

Opening: April 11 from 5pm

Curated by Conxita Oliver and Joan Gil

We want to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the passing of the artist Josep M. Subirachs (Barcelona, 1927-2014) with an exhibition that highlights the essence of his creation, featuring works from the gallery’s own collection. A journey from figuration to abstraction, driven by a constant desire for exploration and investigation; a tension between opposing forces that balances an overflowing and inquisitive personality. The title, “Subirachs. In essence,” refers to the intention that guided him towards achieving synthetic form, schematization, and simplification: towards all that is primordial, transcendent, and primal.

“Drawing, sometimes looked down upon, has a capital importance, since it is where the intention of the creator is seen most purely […] The drawing is, due to its essential character, art in its purest form”.

Josep Maria Subirachs

We have wished to relate and connect sculpture with drawing because it is in this discipline that the soul of the artist is expressed, not through form but in the form.

Subirachs’ drawings are not sketches or studies, but rather have the character of final works with which he undertook his experimentation in his three-dimensional universe. He considered that the drawing is, among all the fields, the seed, the origin, the foundations, the truth. These are his words: “First, and this is the moment in which the idea already tries to materialise, there exists a large quantity of sketches on paper and in clay which, little by little, take shape and, at the same time, clarify the initial idea in the mind of the artist; the idea and the shape advance together in parallel.”

For this exhibition, we have published a catalogue, written by Joan Gil and Conxita Oliver, which will be available at the gallery and at the link provided below.