Ferrán García Sevilla

FERRÁN GARCÍA SEVILLA (Palma de Mallorca, 1949).
“Cien 31,” 1987.
Oil on canvas.
Signed on the reverse.
Measurements: 162 x 130 cm; 165 x 133 cm (frame).

Initially involved in art theory and criticism, García Sevilla has taught fine arts at various universities. He held his first solo exhibition in 1972. After beginning his artistic career in conceptual art, he turned to painting and graphic art, within the framework of what is known as postmodern art. He typically arranges well-defined, often anthropomorphic figures against neutral backgrounds or against backgrounds featuring insistently repeated motifs. He uses rich, vivid, and contrasting color palettes, employing a simplified visual language that at times resembles primitive art. García Sevilla’s enormous paintings, his forceful images, his often brutal humor, the texts that occupy part of the surface of these paintings, and his expressive power have become familiar to viewers in Spain and abroad alike. Endowed with an imagination almost as prodigious as his willpower, García Sevilla is a veritable machine for producing paintings, for devouring and transforming images. All of this finds its expression in the verbal realm: from his famous interview with Kevin Power, included in the latter’s book *Conversations with…* (1985), no one doubts that García Sevilla is one of the Spanish painters with the most to say, and that, beneath an appearance of improvisation—and, when the mood strikes, delirium—he gives the meaning of his work the most thought. In this regard, his case is reminiscent of Miró’s, for whom he has always expressed great admiration. He has held solo exhibitions in Europe and the United States and participated in group shows in Hamburg, Vienna, Munich, St. Petersburg, Lisbon, and various Spanish cities, as well as at Documenta in Kassel (1987) and the Biennales of Istanbul (1989) and São Paulo (1996). Among the solo exhibitions he has held in recent years, those at the Elga Wimmer Gallery in New York (1992), the Thomas Netusil Kunsthandel in Vienna (2000), and the Fúcares Gallery in Madrid (2008) stand out. García Sevilla is represented in the Centre Pompidou in Paris—National Museum of Modern Art, the Reina Sofía National Museum, the MACBA in Barcelona, the Atlantic Center for Modern Art in Las Palmas, the CaixaForum in Barcelona, the Suñol Foundation, the Ico Collections Museum, Es Baluard in Palma de Mallorca, the IVAM in Valencia, the Juan March Foundation, the Patio Herreriano Museum in Valladolid, ARTIUM in Vitoria, and MuHKA in Antwerp.