Magda Bolumar

MAGDA BOLUMAR CHERTÓ (Caldes d’Estrac, Barcelona, 1936).
“Somni,” 1996.
Painting and collage on burlap.
Signed, located, and dated “Mataró 96.” Titled on the reverse.
Measurements: 122 x 163 cm; 124.5 x 165.5 cm (frame).

A large-scale work dated 1996, “Somni” belongs to the full maturity of the xarpelleres, the textile language that Magda Bolumar began in 1960 and which became the most distinctive core of her body of work. In these works, fibers, threads, tensions, embroidery, and paint construct a relief surface situated between painting and object. MACBA specifically highlights the originality with which Bolumar transferred her training in painting to the textile realm, creating organic structures reminiscent of networks, stellar bodies, and planetary universes.

Against the intense blue background, a network of taut lines connects clusters of red, violet, green, and blue, while the fans of thread introduce rhythms and expansions that suggest organisms, constellations, or imaginary diagrams. The title, “Dream,” reinforces this poetic and open-ended dimension. The physical tension of the threads organizes the space, and the chromatic points seem to function as centers of energy within a composition of cosmic resonances—an imagery particularly characteristic of the artist.

Magda Bolumar is a singular figure in the postwar Catalan avant-garde and one of the earliest artists to incorporate textiles into her own pictorial exploration. Associated since the 1950s with the circles of Dau al Set and Club 49, she presented her first xarpelleres at the Sala Gaspar in Barcelona in 1960. Her work is held in the collections of MACBA, the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya, the Museu de Granollers, and the Víctor Balaguer Museum Library. In recent years, her career has been the subject of renewed institutional attention, with exhibitions at the Museu de Granollers, Manifesta 15, and the solo exhibition *Constellations* at Mayoral Paris in 2025.