Albert Gonzalo
Exhibition 13.09 - 28.10.2018
Arts Santa Mònica
In collaboration with Arts Santa Mònica, we present Ofrenes, an exhibition bringing together a significant selection of Albert Gonzalo’s multidisciplinary work as a painter, printmaker, photographer, poet, and draftsman. The project combines large-scale works with working notebooks and travel journals, which reveal the influence of his numerous journeys through Africa, the Middle East, and the Far East.
The exhibition explores his symbolic and spiritual universe—an пространство where traditions, rituals, and transcultural iconographies are transformed into an intense and evocative pictorial practice that transcends formal representation. Ofrenes offers an in-depth view of Gonzalo’s creative world, highlighting both the visual richness of his production and the complexity of his thematic concerns.
Installed within the contemporary context of Arts Santa Mònica, the exhibition underscores the poetic depth and coherence of his creative universe.
The work of Albert Gonzalo (Tarragona, 1954 – Barcelona, 2014) should be regarded as one of the most personal and fascinating artistic contributions developed in Spain from the 1980s onward. Although especially devoted to painting, his oeuvre also encompasses other artistic disciplines such as drawing and photography.
His work must be understood within a broad and complex framework in which, alongside his artistic research, converge his dedication to teaching as a tenured professor at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Barcelona since 1979, his academic research—culminating in a PhD awarded cum laude in 1984—and his extensive travels.
Broadly speaking, Gonzalo’s art should be understood as a direct consequence of his journeys through countries in Africa, the Middle East, and the Far East. These travels provided not only an opportunity to encounter their rich and, at times, millenary artistic practices, but also a profound and direct engagement with diverse spiritual traditions such as Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Jainism, and Hinduism.
A prolific artist, his intense artistic praxis can only be fully understood as the result of an ongoing dialogue with spirituality. For the exhibition Ofrenes, our aim has been not only to present some of his large-scale works, but also a selection of his pictorial notebooks and travel journals, in which one can find the essences and fragrances of what would later materialize in larger formats, as well as the relationship of this body of work with the aforementioned spiritual traditions.
http://artssantamonica.gencat.cat/ca/detall/Ofrenes-dAlbert-Gonzalo