Miquel Barceló valuation
Mallorcan painter of thick, earthy surfaces — bulls, fish, Africa, libraries — and of clay walls that fill a cathedral chapel.
Miquel Barceló was born in Felanitx, Mallorca, in 1957, and studied briefly at the art schools of Palma and Barcelona.
What a work by Miquel Barceló is worth
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Bio
Miquel Barceló was born in Felanitx, Mallorca, in 1957, and studied briefly at the art schools of Palma and Barcelona. He was twenty-five when he was chosen for documenta 7 in Kassel in 1982, and his heavily textured paintings of the 1980s — studios, libraries, kitchens, animals — made his name. In 1988 he first travelled to Mali, and he has worked there for long periods since, in the Dogon country, painting with local pigments and on occasion leaving works on paper to the termites. Africa, the sea, the bullring, fish and octopus have been constant subjects, and clay a constant material. He covered the chapel of Sant Pere in Palma Cathedral in modelled ceramic, unveiled in 2007, and the dome of the Human Rights and Alliance of Civilizations Room at the United Nations in Geneva with dripped and poured colour in 2008. He represented Spain at the Venice Biennale in 2009.
His paintings are built of thick mixed media — pigment, earth, ash, paper and sometimes organic matter — so surfaces crack, shed and change, and condition needs expert examination. The ceramics are unique and fragile, and there is a substantial printed output and a great many works on paper, including watercolours and drawings from his African notebooks. Provenance through his galleries, among them Thaddaeus Ropac, Bruno Bischofberger and Galería Elvira González, and the date and place where a work was made are the main reference points.
Felanitx, documenta 7 and Mali
He received the Prince of Asturias Award for the Arts in 2003, and illustrated Dante's Divine Comedy with a cycle of watercolours.
In Paso Doble, performed at the Avignon Festival in 2006 with the choreographer Josef Nadj, the two men worked their way through a wall and floor of wet clay in front of the audience.
Taller Llunàtic, Terrae Motus and the Geneva dome
Barceló spent two years at the arts and crafts school in Palma and only a few months at the fine art school in Barcelona, which he entered in 1974, before returning to Mallorca to join the protests and happenings of the conceptual group Taller Llunàtic and its magazine Neon de Suro; his first one-man show followed at the Palma museum. Velázquez, Tintoretto and Rembrandt mattered to him as much as Pollock and Dubuffet. In 1983 he spent five months in Naples making works with volcanic cinder for Lucio Amelio, and gave L'ombra che trema, a self-portrait, to Amelio's Terrae Motus collection, now at the Royal Palace of Caserta.
He received Spain's National Award for Plastic Arts in 1986, designed the costumes and sets for Falla's El retablo de maese Pedro at the Opéra-Comique in Paris in 1990, and showed his Divine Comedy watercolours at the Louvre in 2004. The terracotta of the Sant Pere chapel in Palma takes its imagery from the sixth chapter of St John, the multiplication of the loaves and fishes, because the chapel is dedicated to the Last Supper. The Geneva ceiling, presented on 18 November 2008, covers 1,500 square metres in stalactites of colour made with 100 tonnes of paint. He also shows with Tobias Mueller in Zürich and Acquavella in New York.
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