⚡︎ Joan Claret. 1959. Paintings

For many years, Joan Claret was an artist with major international recognition and one of the leading figures of Catalan abstract painting in the second half of the 20th century. In recent years, several exhibitions have helped contextualise his work and highlight its significance. With this exhibition, 1959 Joan Claret Paintings, we aim not only to emphasise the importance of the artist, but also to focus on a single year of his career — a year in which he first presented a body of work that would become the foundation of all his later artistic production.

All the works in the exhibition come from the artist’s collection, and most will be shown publicly for the first time following careful cleaning and conservation work carried out to protect this important legacy and restore its original strength and nuances. The result is a remarkable group of paintings that demonstrate the vitality that geometric and kinetic painting had in Catalonia during the 1950s and 1960s, as also seen in the work of Joan Vilacasas, Joan Puig Manera and Enric Planasdurà, among others.

Indeed, 1959 was a crucial year for Joan Claret: it was also the year he returned from Paris and held his first solo exhibition at Sala Gaspar. This marked his definitive break with the classical and figurative style he had pursued after abandoning his architectural studies in the early 1950s, and the beginning of a path centred on constructivism. His commitment was bold and determined, especially considering that the artistic scene at the time was largely dominated by Informalism. Cirici Pellicer described Claret as “a pure constructivist painter, a heroic resister against Informalism”. Thus, 1959 was the year in which Claret fully embraced geometric painting inspired by his architectural knowledge, while also establishing a clear formal distance from the large Informalist artistic community of the period.

Barcelona Gallery Weekend
⚡︎ Flash Programme: only on view from 17—20 September