Miguel Torner de Semir

MIGUEL TORNER DE SEMIR (Santa Pau, Girona, 1938).
Untitled.
Oil and collage on canvas.
Signed in the lower left corner.
Measurements: 80 x 64 cm; 99 x 82 cm (frame).

Painter formed in the Schools Massana of Barcelona and San Fernando of Madrid, Miguel Torner de Semir celebrated his first individual exhibition in Terrassa, in 1968, and since then he will realize others in diverse points of Catalonia and in Paris (galleries Espace and Boutique). Subsequently he will also show his work in other countries of Europe and America, as well as in Japan. A man of the old Catalonia, of great culture, Torner de Semir has always been attracted by the Middle Ages, the Romanesque of the Pyrenees and the primitive Gothic. A disciple of the mural painter and engraver Richard Marlet, with whom he became acquainted with modernism and Catalan noucentisme, he developed an oeuvre centered eminently on drawing. After finishing his studies in Madrid, where he visited the Prado Museum and was imbued with the work of Velázquez, he traveled to Paris, where he encountered all the pictorial trends of the twentieth century, which he already knew from his contacts in Barcelona with the Dau al Set group. All these events will lead his work to what he calls a point "between the old and the new". His language is thus influenced by the ancients (Giotto, the Renaissance, the Middle Ages...), but at the same time by the informal search of abstract painters. All this is the starting point of his painting; Torner de Semir is as much or more concerned with the craft than with the concept, and tries to establish a bridge between the past and the present, but without ceasing to be open to the new, in constant search. He is currently represented in the Pedreguet-Art Espai Contemporani collection.