Helena Almeida: 'Seduzir' [To Seduce, 2002] (detail)

Collection

GRA-6

Image caption
FERRÁN GARCÍA SEVILLA

GRA-6

  • 2003
  • Mixed technique on canvas
  • 250 x 250 cm
  • Cat. P_741
  • Acquired in 2007
By:
Frederic Montornés

Ferran García Sevilla's art is easily identifiable by the workmanship and lexicon of an unalterable language, in his desire to experiment with and question the world in an ironic and poetic fashion. He is an artist who is hard to classify, but it is equally difficult to delimit his capacity to transform given images, to permanently alter the iconographic system he is passing through, to overcome the approach to any comfort zone and to ally himself with wild areas of thought from a perspective that is as cosmic as it is mythological or everyday.

In the late 1960s, he abandoned conceptual art — texts, film, photography, body art, performance art, experimental work and political criticism — to enter the field of painting, removed from any dogmatism other than his own. After an initial stage of radical approaches and a championing of the primitive, the impulse of the original and the anti-conformism evident in large-scale works, García Sevilla's painting evolved viscerally and continuously, and between 1988 and 1989 he enjoyed great success with his mosaics.

As he consolidated his position as a painter, in the late 1980s, he created Polygon 32 (1988), a clearly experimental acrylic in which he developed a vocabulary of geometric images, midway between the decorative image, symbolism, the game board and the evocation of unconnected worlds. GRA-6 (2003) is one of a series of paintings entitled Bol, Ras o pic. It is an acrylic on canvas whose narrative is based on an accumulation of dots, spots and geometric shapes of minimal expression, i.e., limited to form and the use of plain colours. Despite its decorative appearance, this work is based on an investigation into the behaviour of the dripping process, ironically hitting back at those who felt he was addicted to the interpretation of reality. It is a festive painting, imbued with the spirit of Wassily Kandinsky and Jackson Pollock and might be a symbolic representation of the universe, a scientific imaginary or, simply, a depiction of the passing of time.

Frederic Montornés

 
By:
Roberto Díaz
Ferrán García Sevilla
Palma 1949

In 1969, Ferrán García Sevilla moved to Barcelona to study at the Central University, where he later lectured in art history. He initially took up conceptual art, but abandoned it in the late 1970s to devote himself exclusively to painting. He went on to become one of the leading international exponents of the 'return to painting' movement of the 1980s, with neo-expressionist works showing influences from Joan Miró, Paul Klee, art brut, primitive oriental cultures and urban art expressions such as graffiti. In the 1980s, he developed his own personal symbolic universe of easily identifiable forms, in which anthropomorphic presences were often reduced to silhouettes. He also included textual references alluding to the artist himself and his work, in strongly cryptic combinations and compositions, but with a great expressive charge, on undefined colour backgrounds. In the late 1980s, his work shifted more and more towards abstraction in synthetic forms, dominated by lines, circles, dots, spirals and arrows, as forms of energy in indefinite spaces, which he executed using stippling, drips and stains. By the turn of the century, these had become pure constellations of colour on neutral backgrounds.

His early series, such as Déus (1981) and later Ruc (1987), earned him a place on the international scene and his work was exhibited at the Venice Biennale (1986), Prospect Frankfurt (Frankfurt, Germany, 1986), Documenta 8 (Kassel, Germany, 1987) and the São Paulo Biennial (1996). He has staged solo exhibitions at the Reina Sofía Museum (Madrid, 1989); the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art (1996); the Centre del Carme at the Valencia Institute of Modern Art (IVAM) (Valencia, 1998); the Patio Herreriano Museum (Valladolid, 2010); and the Irish Museum of Modern Art (Dublin, 2010).

Roberto Díaz

 
 
Vv.Aa. Colección Banco de España. Catálogo razonado, Madrid, Banco de España, 2019, vol. 2.