Rafael Bartolozzi

RAFAEL BARTOLOZZI (Pamplona, 1943 - Vespella de Gaià, Tarragona, 2009).
Untitled, 1973.
Mixed media on paper.
Signed and dated.
Measurements: 56 x 37 cm; 75 x 57 cm (frame).
Grandson and son of artists, he changed the order of the surnames to continue in the succession of the maternal line. He studied at the Escuela de Bellas Artes San Jorge, Barcelona (1964) and at the Escuela de Pintura Mural de Sant Cugat del Vallés. Since then he has been linked to Catalonia, without losing his contacts and references to Navarre. Between 1967 and 1980 he worked as a team with Eduardo Arranz Bravo. Together they made the mural paintings of the Tipel factory in Parets del Vallés (1970), Magalluf in Mallorca (1973), Camilo José Cela's house in Palma de Mallorca (1978) and the happening in Granollers directed by Juan Illa in 1974. He was selected to represent Spain at the Venice Biennale in 1980. In 1992 he won the First Prize at the X Biennial of Sports in Fine Arts. He painted the Essertecu mural at the Universitat Rovira i Virgili in Tarragona (1997). He lived in his house-studio Margodí, in Vespella de Gaiá (Tarragona), a town of which he was mayor from 1991-2002 and where he organized numerous cultural activities, such as the Joan Brossa National Visual Poetry Prize together with Joan Abelló, and the museum of open-air art installations (with eleven sculptures between 1995 and 2000). He stood out as a painter in the 1960s and 1970s for his particular, erotic and polychrome version of pop art, of which he is one of the main representatives in Spain, and of the New Figuration. In the 1980s, his language entered a more dreamlike world, identifying with the Mediterranean environment; his works are populated by a highly imaginative and organic fauna and vegetation, in which the universe of Klee and Miró are a conceptual reference. In 2007 the Bartolozzi Foundation was created in that town, with the aim of gathering and disseminating his work, as well as promoting the work of new artists. He is also represented at the MACBA in Barcelona, the Camón Aznar Museum in Zaragoza, the Contemporary Art Museums in Seville and Las Palmas and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Navarra, among others.