Josep Grau-Garriga

JOSEP GRAU-GARRIGA (Barcelona, 1928- Angers, 2011).
Untitled.
Tapestry.
With label on the back.
Measurements: 110 x 160 cm.

This tapestry by Josep Grau-Garriga can be read as a direct and symbolic evocation of the Catalan flag, integrated in the material and experimental language that defines his mature production. The red horizontal bands, sewn and stretched over a field of ochre and yellow tones, unequivocally refer to the four stripes, reinterpreted not as a literal heraldic emblem, but as an eroded, corporeal and lived sign. The flag appears here transformed into a wounded, frayed and rough fabric, charged with memory and tension.

The material -thick fibers, knots, reliefs and worn areas- reinforces this reading of identity: the senyera ceases to be a flat symbol to become a physical territory, a collective skin marked by time, work and history. This approach is characteristic of Grau-Garriga, who from the sixties onwards uses tapestry as a political and cultural language, especially in relation to Catalan identity and cultural resistance during Franco's regime and the transition.

Within his career, the work is at the core of his most recognized contribution: the redefinition of tapestry as a contemporary expressive medium, close to informalism and sculpture, and as a vehicle for symbolic affirmation. The reference to the senyera, recurrent in his production, is not decorative but existential and collective, and turns the tapestry into a material manifesto where identity, memory and gesture merge into a single structure.

Formally, the piece dialogues with the informalist and material-expressive aesthetics that Grau-Garriga has been developing since the late 1950s, influenced by European informalism and by his intellectual proximity to artists such as Tàpies. Conceptually, the tapestry becomes a support for memory, territory and resistance, where the fiber acts as a metaphor for the body, manual labor and collective identity, recurring themes in his work.

Within the artist's trajectory, this work exemplifies his fundamental role as a renovator of contemporary textile art, especially since his international projection in the sixties and seventies, when he freed the tapestry from the wall and conceived it as an autonomous medium, loaded with symbolic and social content. The presence of the original label on the back reinforces its historical and documentary character, placing it within the recognized and consolidated production of one of the great referents of contemporary European tapestry.

Grau Garriga took the tapestry genre to its limits. In the early 1960s, his weavings gradually became sculptural textiles and a tactile medium, as Grau-Garriga saw his work as a volume in space. With great innovation, she explored the beauty of the back of the tapestry, the untidy underside of the work that is usually hidden. During the 1960s and 1970s, her experiments attracted weavers such as María Assumpció Raventós and Aurelia Muñoz and led to the founding of the Catalan Tapestry School. Artists such as Miro, Tapies and Picasso also came to Sant Cugat del Vallés to work with Grau Garriga. In 1970, the first major retrospective of Grau Garriga's work was held at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. In 1987, at the invitation of painter Rufino Tamayo, Grau Garriga visited Mexico. Reacting to the political and social climate in the country, he created a monumental piece for the Museo Rufino Tamayo in Mexico City.