Antoni Clavé

ANTONI CLAVÉ I SANMARTÍ (Barcelona, 1913 – Saint-Tropez, France, 2005).
“Avec punaises,” 1982.
Mixed media (ink, crayons, thumbtacks, punctures, nails, engravings, and chalk) on metal.
Accompanied by a certificate of authenticity issued by the Clavé Archives.
Signed.
Measurements: 45 x 35 cm.
In *Avec punaises*, Antoni Clavé took one of the central concerns of his mature work to a new level: transforming the pictorial surface into an object. Created in 1982, the piece belongs to a period of particular experimentation within his career, when painting, collage, printmaking, and sculpture began to converge in increasingly material and three-dimensional compositions. It was also a period of full international recognition, immediately preceding his representation of the Spanish pavilion at the 1984 Venice Biennale.
The thumbtacks, which give the work its title, are much more than a mere accessory here. Together with the punctures, nails, wax, ink, and engraving, they physically transform the support and reveal the work’s construction process. Clavé thus explored the tension between the pictorial and the object-based, between the surface and the relief, causing the material to take on an almost sculptural presence. This exploration tied in with the collages and trompe-l’œil works Clavé had been developing since the late 1970s, in which torn paper, folds, strings, and elements affixed to the surface created a deliberately ambiguous illusion between the real and the represented.
Trained at the School of Fine Arts in Barcelona, where his teachers included Fèlix Mestres, Josep Mongrell, and Àngel Ferrant, Clavé began his career as a poster artist and illustrator before devoting himself fully to painting and printmaking. After the Civil War, he went into exile in France and settled in Paris, where he came into contact with the School of Paris. His international recognition took hold in the 1950s, with exhibitions in major European capitals, the United States, and Japan. Among his notable achievements are the UNESCO Printmaking Prize at the Venice Biennale (1956), the retrospectives in Paris in 1978, and his participation in the 1984 Venice Biennale—the year he received the Gold Medal from the Generalitat de Catalunya.His work is represented in major public collections, including the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid, which holds 82 of the artist’s works, the MACBA in Barcelona, as well as the BBVA Collection and the European Parliament’s Contemporary Art Collection.