Maties Palau Ferré

MATIES PALAU FERRÉ (Montblanc, Tarragona, 1924 - 2000).
"Maternity".
Waxes on paper.
Signed.
Measurements: 58 x 76 cm; 82 x 100 cm (frame).

Palau Ferré was formed in Barcelona, in the School of Fine Arts of Sant Jordi. He exhibited his work for the first time in 1951, at the Fine Arts Exhibition in Barcelona. From then on, he exhibited his work in Barcelona, Madrid and London, and also participated in the Salones de Otoño in Barcelona. In 1957 he receives a scholarship from the French government to further his studies at the School of Fine Arts in Paris, where he lives until 1961. He exhibited in several Parisian galleries and, in 1971, he was invited to hold a solo exhibition at Syracuse University in New York. In the early seventies he experienced a personal and legal conflict regarding the commercialization of his art through art dealers, which culminated in a sentence that condemned him to pay a dealer with a certain number of square meters of his oil paintings. After complying with the ruling, and greatly outraged, he made the fatal decision to burn his works thereafter, immediately after they were created, as a demonstration of disagreement with what he saw as an attack on freedom of artistic expression and a brutally commercial manipulation of the artist's creative spirit. Between 1974 and 1989 he did not exhibit or show any of his work in public, and never painted oil paintings again. In the nineties he exhibited his work again, particularly Chinese inks, in numerous exhibitions in Spain and the United States, but never again in commercial art galleries. In 2001 a museum dedicated to his work was inaugurated in his hometown.