Josep Guinovart

JOSEP GUINOVART BERTRAN (Barcelona, 1927 - 2007).
"Sargantana", 1974.
Mixed media on fiber cement.
Oil referenced in the catalog raisonné of the artist, ed. Polígrafa, pg.233, nº488.
Signed on the back.
With label of the Adrià gallery.
Measurements: 186 x 53 cm.

"Sargantana" belongs to one of the most intense and material moments in Guinovart's career, when the artist explores unconventional supports and industrial materials to expand the pictorial language towards the territory of the object and relief. The use of fiber cement -a humble material associated with construction- reinforces his desire to be rooted to the earth and the primary.

The vertical composition, narrow and emphatic, integrates sand, pigments, wood and adhered elements that evoke the symbolic silhouette of the lizard -a recurring motif in the artist's Mediterranean imaginary- more suggested than described. The earthy textures, inlays and eroded areas dialogue with large dark surfaces, generating a tension between nature and industrial matter, between landscape and sign.

The sargantana becomes here an emblem of resistance, adaptation and telluric vitality, central concepts in Guinovart's work in the seventies.

Josep Guinovart is represented in the Museums of Contemporary Art in Barcelona, Madrid and Mexico City, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, the Museo de Bellas Artes in Bilbao, the Museo San Telmo in San Sebastián, the Museo Eusebio Sempere in Alicante, the Museo de Navarra in Tafalla, the Casa de las Américas in Havana, the Bocchum Museum in Germany, the Museo de Bellas Artes in Long Island, New York, and the Museo Patio Herreriano in Valladolid.