- Artist:
- Miquel Barceló
- Date:
- 1987
- Technique:
- Mixed technique on canvas
- Dimensions:
- 285 x 355 cm
- Origin:
- Es Baluard Museu d'Art Contemporani de Palma, Serra Collection long-term loan
- Registration number:
- 17
Fifteen holes is the title of a large-format pictorial piece produced in the late ‘eighties belonging to the well-known “Holes” series. The canvas depicts a “swooping” close-up of a piece of ground the only objectual presence of which is found in the form of the perforations made all over the surface. Barceló continues his interest in the landscape genre and experiments using the non-presence, the void, strengthening three-dimensionality using a figurative language of his own based on texture and matter, to give shape to this emphatic piece which maintains a similar composition to other paintings made in the same year in New York.
S.H.
Lives and works between Mallorca and Paris. He studied at the School of Arts and Crafts in Palma and, began to study fine arts at the University of Barcelona in 1974. At the end of the 1970s, he presented his first works, which were close to the conceptual spirit linked to the Taller Llunàtic group in Palma. A first trip to Paris introduced him to art brut and the abstract expressionism popular in the US.
By the nineteen-eighties Barceló’s figurative painting with expressionist nuances was clearly related to two internationally prominent artistic movements: the new German expressionist painting and the Italian transavantgarde. Together with Miguel Ángel Campano and José María Sicilia, Miquel Barceló is one of the most significant representatives of Spanish painting in the 1980s and his work has been identified with a group of artists who recovered the practice of painting based on a sensitivity to material. Barceló received the National Plastic Arts Prize from the Spanish Ministry of Culture in 1986, the Prince of Asturias Award for the Arts in 2003, the National Graphic Arts Prize in 2014, and was awarded an honorary degree by the University of Salamanca in 2017.
S.H.
