Joan Hernández Pijuan was a leading artist whose long and brilliant career has led to him being acclaimed as one of the most outstanding Spanish painters of recent decades. The strength of his creative individuality places him outside currents and fashions, but that does not prevent a deep identification with the aesthetic concerns of his time from showing through in his work. Hernandez Pijuan studied at the School of Arts and Crafts and at the Fine Arts School in Barcelona between 1952 and 1956, when he also first exhibited his work at the Mataró Municipal Museum. In 1957 he moved to Paris, where he studied engraving and lithography. It was at that time when his work began to adopt a geometric figurative style where everyday elements appear alone against generally green or grey smooth backgrounds framed in squares. Hernández Pijuan did not return to informalism until the 1980s, when he went back to painting from the perspective of austerity and radicalism for which he has always been known. From then onwards, he made simplicity the chief artistic aspect of his work, addressed space in al almost essentialist way and eliminated any embellishment in his need to embody close emotions between the eye and the landscape.

His legacy goes beyond his pictorial output and also includes literary and academic texts.  In 1977 he started lecturing at the Sant Jordi Fine Arts School in Barcelona, where he held the post of full professor of Painting from 1989 and where he was appointed Dean in 1992. His work is in numerous collections, events and museums around the world, including the 2005 Venice Bienniale. Anthologies include ‘Espacios de silencio, 1972-1992’ [‘Spaces of Silence, 1972-1992’], curated by Elvira Maluquer at the Museo Reina Sofía (Madrid, 1993), which was taken to the Monterrey Museum of Mexico; ‘Volviendo a un lugar conocido, 1972-2002’ [‘Returning to a Known Place, 1972-2002’], curated by María de Corral at the Contemporary Art Museum (Barcelona. 2003), which was put on at the Musée d’art et d’histoire de Neuchatel (Switzerland), the Malmö Konsthall (Malmo, Denmark) and the Galleria Comunale d’Arte Moderna in Bologna (Italy); and the last major review of his work since the 1970s, which was entitled ‘Farben der Erde – Colores de la tierra’ [‘Farben der Erde – Colours of the Earth’] and was shown at Altana Kultur Stiftung (Bad Homburg, Germany, 2011) and at the Moscow Modern Art Museum as ‘Retrospective’ (2012). He won the National Plastics Art Award in 1981 and the National Graphic Art Award in 2004.

Maite Méndez Baiges