Modest Cuixart

MODEST CUIXART (Barcelona, 1925 – Palamós, 2007).
“Sexe lliure,” 1981.
Oil on canvas.
Signed and dated “81” at the bottom.
On the reverse, titled and with handwritten inscriptions.
Exhibited: “Concordancias en la pintura española actual,” Banco de Bilbao, Madrid, 1983. On the reverse, it retains a label from Macarrón, S.A., relating to that exhibition.
Measurements: 81 x 100 cm.

“Sexe lliure” belongs to the extensive figurative period in which Cuixart transformed the body, eroticism, and expressionist distortion into vehicles for provocative and critical painting. The Cuixart Foundation characterizes this phase by a figurative style that is both sumptuous and grotesque in appearance, laden with satire and directed against hypocrisy and social conventions, while maintaining the surreal and sinister undertone that runs through his entire career.

Against a white background, the artist arranges a repertoire of organic forms and figures with a distinctly sexual character. A large biomorphic mass dominates the upper portion, while small anthropomorphic figures and phallic forms in intense red introduce a deliberately uncomfortable tension between eroticism, humor, and strangeness. Under the title “Sexe lliure,” the composition thus takes on an openly transgressive dimension.

The artist’s own career allows us to understand this work as an extension of an early preoccupation: as early as the beginning of the 1960s, Cuixart had directly addressed sexual themes, and between 1965 and 1969 he developed an erotic-magical series. In the following decades, these themes reappeared within a more grotesque and satirical figurative style, characterized by distorted bodies and associations rooted in Surrealism.

Modest Cuixart was one of the leading figures in the postwar renewal of Catalan and Spanish art. A co-founder in 1948 of Dau al Set alongside Antoni Tàpies, Joan Ponç, Joan Brossa, Arnau Puig, and Joan-Josep Tharrats, he achieved international recognition early on and won the Grand Prize for Painting at the São Paulo Biennial in 1959. Fundació Cuixart He also participated in international exhibitions such as *New Spanish Painting and Sculpture* at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (1960) and *Modern Spanish Painting* at the Tate Gallery in London (1962).