A self-taught artist, Luis Claramunt began painting at the age of fifteen, when he started to escape the cultured, petty-bourgeois atmosphere of his family home to explore the slums of Barcelona. He mainly painted urban scenes and the interiors of tablaos (flamenco bars), using expressionist brushstrokes, with a variegated graphic composition jumbling architectural features, bodies and objects. In 1986 he moved to Seville, from where he made frequent visits to Marrakesh. This was to be the beginning of a new stage in which he gradually dematerialised the image, from the stain as a forming element of the composition to the line, graphic work and calligraphy to which he reduces the figure in a process that entailed emptying the space. In his series dedicated to Bilbao and Madrid, to which he moved in 1989, there is tendency to work with black on white. His series Shadow Line, inspired by Joseph Conrad's novel of the same name, marked the beginning of his interest in the theme of the sea, which continued until his final series, completed in 1999, Shipwrecks and Storms. His art work also includes drawings, photographs and self-published books, produced mainly between 1994 and 1999, in which he developed and expanded his pictorial language.
Claramunt first achieved fame when his work was included in the exhibition 'Cota cero (+/- 0.00)' ['Sea Level (+/- 0.00)' at the Sala Parpalló in Valencia (1985) and with the monographic exhibition of his work staged by the Seville Museum of Contemporary Art (1986). In 2012 the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art held a retrospective of his work.
A self-taught artist, Luis Claramunt began painting at the age of fifteen, when he started to escape the cultured, petty-bourgeois atmosphere of his family home to explore the slums of Barcelona. He mainly painted urban scenes and the interiors of tablaos (flamenco bars), using expressionist brushstrokes, with a variegated graphic composition jumbling architectural features, bodies and objects. In 1986 he moved to Seville, from where he made frequent visits to Marrakesh. This was to be the beginning of a new stage in which he gradually dematerialised the image, from the stain as a forming element of the composition to the line, graphic work and calligraphy to which he reduces the figure in a process that entailed emptying the space. In his series dedicated to Bilbao and Madrid, to which he moved in 1989, there is tendency to work with black on white. His series Shadow Line, inspired by Joseph Conrad's novel of the same name, marked the beginning of his interest in the theme of the sea, which continued until his final series, completed in 1999, Shipwrecks and Storms. His art work also includes drawings, photographs and self-published books, produced mainly between 1994 and 1999, in which he developed and expanded his pictorial language.
Claramunt first achieved fame when his work was included in the exhibition 'Cota cero (+/- 0.00)' ['Sea Level (+/- 0.00)' at the Sala Parpalló in Valencia (1985) and with the monographic exhibition of his work staged by the Seville Museum of Contemporary Art (1986). In 2012 the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art held a retrospective of his work.