Luis Marsans y Juliá created his own, highly lyrical style of realist painting. On the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936 he moved with his family to Paris, where he lived until 1940. In 1947 he travelled to the USA and Mexico, where he met Catalan sculptor Ismael Smith, who encouraged him to devote himself to painting. Back in Barcelona, he trained with Ramón Rogent and came into contact with the Dau al Set Group. In the mid-1950s he met Marcel Duchamp in Cadaqués. Later, in the 1960s, he destroyed his earlier works and made his final switch to figurative painting, influenced by Ramón Gaya. Between 1966 and 1970 he produced a number of drawings in ink and gouache based on Proust's À la Recherche du Temps Perdu. These were exhibited first in Barcelona and later at the Musée Balzac in Paris in 1982, where they earned him widespread acclaim. From then on, he produced works with recurring themes involving details of interiors in which music (through scenes showing sheet music beside instruments and vases of flowers) and literature (paintings featuring shelves crammed with books with illegible titles) took centre stage in a subtle, melancholy, private world that he was to develop over the following decades.

His first solo exhibitions were in 1972 at the Trece Gallery in Barcelona and in 1980 at the Jacob Gallery in Paris. He subsequently became a regular at the renowned Claude Bernard in New York and Paris throughout the 1980s. In 1985 he took part in the joint exhibition 'Representation Abroad' at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington D.C. Solo exhibitions of his work have been staged at the Exhibition & Convention Centre in Zaragoza (1989) and the Palau de la Virreina in Barcelona (1995). The latter was an itinerant exhibition which was also shown at the Caja Rioja Foundation in Logroño (1995), at the Palacio Almudí in Murcia (1995) and at the Casal Solleric in Palma (1995).

Roberto Díaz