Center Stage: The Laura Pels Collection | Act I: Fine Art

Lot note:

Miquel Barceló’s childhood on the rugged island of Mallorca, where he was born in 1957, triggered a long-standing fascination for the natural world in all its forms, which has inspired him richly textured canvases that speak to Earth’s materiality and ever-changing colors, as exemplified in the several works by the artist Laura Pels collected.

Considered one of the greatest contemporary living artists, Barceló has continuously revered, and referenced the Old Masters such as Caravaggio, Francisco de Zurbarán, Juan Sánchez Cotán, and even Joan Miró and Pablo Picasso. As demonstrated in the Laura Pels Collection, among Barceló’s favorite subjects are still-lifes, which never truly remain still, as the artist captures them in complex layers that make them vibrant, real almost. Insisting on paint’s tactile, and materialistic properties, Barceló’s canvases are always coarse, so as to convey nature’s forever-changing state, and to create an organic symbiosis between the paint, the canvas and the depicted still-life itself. The result leads to a hypersensitive artwork with a heightened sense of touch, in line with the Viennese concept of haptic art, which makes the artist's creations as complex as they are palpable. As he expressed himself: “What interests me in still life is to work with it as organic material, to feel it as pure material . . . Sometimes I use the elements as a pretext to create a kind of dance inside the picture.” Barceló’s raw approach to painting seems to oppose, and at times contradict, the highly conceptual nature associated with contemporary art, thus promoting a return, a memory of a simpler, almost primitive way of expression: “My paintings are like traces of what has happened there, all that happens in the head, in fact” confessed the artist.

As a result, works such as Yellow Abstraction and La Grappe de Raisin not only channel a long tradition of landscape and still-life painting, but become a landscape and a fruit themselves, blurring the lines between what Nature and Man made, or altered, and inviting us to contemplate our own relationship with the natural world and the changes it undergoes.