Antoni Clavé

ANTONI CLAVÉ I SANMARTÍ (Barcelona, 1913 - Saint Tropez, France, 2005).
"Portrait d'une jeune fille au chapeau", ca. 1954.
Oil on canvas.
Signed in the lower left corner.
Galerie Taménaga label on the stretcher frame.
Certificate of authenticity issued by the Antoni Clavé Archives will be given to the buyer.
Measurements: 46 x 38 cm; 65,5 x 57 cm (frame)

In Portrait d'une jeune fille au chapeau, Antoni Clavé develops a plastic language in full transition, in which the figuration inherited from his first stage coexists with a spatial organization that announces his imminent drift towards abstraction. The figure, conceived from a vibrant and organic matter, emerges on a background that oscillates between the atmospheric and the material. The artist combines glazes, scratches and accumulations of pigment that reveal a highly expressive pictorial gesture, while the light -with clear baroque resonances- gives the scene an introspective and almost metaphysical dimension.
Far from proposing a traditional portrait, Clavé proposes here a symbolic image, in which the young woman appears suspended between representation and poetic evocation. The chromatic accents -particularly the reds and greens of the torso- are integrated into a play of tensions that dissolves the boundaries between figure and background, an essential characteristic of the artist's visual poetics in the 1950s.

Antoni Clavé is one of the fundamental figures of 20th century Spanish art. Trained at the School of Fine Arts of Sant Jordi, he began his career in the field of poster design, illustration and decorative arts. After his participation in the Civil War on the Republican side, he went into exile in France in 1939. Settled in Paris, he came into contact with Vuillard, Bonnard and, especially, Picasso, whose influence was decisive in his stylistic maturation.
The 1950s consolidated his international prestige, with awards such as the Hallmark of New York (1948), the Venice Biennial (1954) and the International Biennial of Tokyo (1957). In 1956 he began his recognition in Spain with his exhibition at the Sala Gaspar. His relationship with medieval iconography - emphasized by his illustrations for Gargantua and Pantagruel - enriched the symbolic imagery that would characterize much of his production.
In 1984, his work was presented monographically in the Spanish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, and that same year he received the Gold Medal of the Generalitat de Catalunya. Today his production is part of collections and museums of reference, including the Museum of Fine Arts in Bilbao, Tate Gallery, Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris, British Museum, Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo and the Reina Sofia Museum.