Rosa Riera

ROSA RIERA (early twentieth century).
"Beach scene", ca.1910.
Oil on canvas.
Signed in the lower left corner.
Relined.
Measurements: 47.5 x 61 cm; 67 x 71 cm (frame).

Rosa Riera was a painter highly valued by the Parisian avant-garde circles. Artists of the artist's contemporaries such as Juan Gris and Modigliani praised her genuine authenticity, fantasy and symbolic force, which can be appreciated in this highly poetic coastal composition, in which a fisherman and another figure are dwarfed by the grandeur of a landscape resolved with a naïff language. The rocks undulate like fossilized shells. Cerulean shades, emerald greens and sienna browns combine with each other giving chromatic strength to this place, a bucolic and timeless vision of the Mediterranean coast.

Rosa Riera was a 20th century Catalan painter, ceramic decorator and woodcut engraver, whose dates of birth and death are unknown. A companion of the postmodernist painter and later cubist Eduard Egozcue (1886-1915), she lived with him in Paris at least between 1912 and 1914. Author of naïve compositions in the line of the customs officer Rousseau, but with a more aggressive touch, Guillaume Apollinaire and Josep Maria Junoy dedicated comments to her work qualified of strong sincerity. On other occasions, her plastic work evokes a primitivism close to Gauguin, but which does not elude the Mediterranean origin of its author. Juan Gris made two cubist portraits of her in the lead mine. He also practiced woodcut in a style close to the German expressionism of the time. Three of her known woodcut matrices are preserved in the Library of Catalonia, and are engraved on both sides. In 2007, the Library made a print for a limited edition folder. It also produced a cover for the almanac of L'Esquella de la Torratxa.