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until 08.12. |#3173ARTatBerlin | Galerie Dittmar presents from 16th September 2021 the solo exhibition Der intime Raum – Die Erfahrung der Natur (> The intimate space – The experience of nature) with works by the artist Joan Hernández Pijuan.
„Repition – a return to the same subject, an insistence on the familiar, an evocation of memory – is a clearly recognizable constant throughout Joan Hernández Pijuan’s oeuvre. That is made explicity clear in his „Iris“ series, which he began in earnest in 1994 during the Holy Week and Easter vacations at the family home in Folquer. – Joan’s drawings tend to be exercises in memory, created from images seen on his walks through the countryside, his reencounters with nature, the places and landscapes to which he enjoyed returning.“
Elvira Maluquer
Joan Hernández Pijuan was born in Barcelona in 1931. Since 1967 participation in the international survey exhibitions of Spanish art. Participated in the Venice Biennials in 1960 and 1970. 1989 professorship at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Barcelona. Represented in the Spanish Pavilion at the 1992 World’s Fair in Seville. 1993 comprehensive survey of his work at the Museo Nacional Reina Sofía in Madrid. Subsequently numerous international museum exhibitions. Consolidation of his rank as one of the most important Spanish artists of the second half of the 20th century. The Metropolitan Museum and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, acquire works. 2005, the year of the artist’s death, special presentation with Agnes Martin at the 51st Venice Biennale.
The preoccupation with questions of space and landscape were the starting point for Hernández Pijuan’s artistic work. In the foreground is the consideration of gaining space from perception and painting. This applies equally to the impasto canvases painted in oil and to the works on paper, which, executed in gouache or also in oil, retain something of the painterly density of the canvases. “Pijuan’s surfaces are physical. They have meaningful underneaths. Their physical thickness facilitates the metaphysical depths that belong to the work… His surfaces are built up for the disclosing what is underneath.” (Arthur C. Danto) To the landscape space as a painterly appearance belongs the drawing motif, the object as an elementary form in sign-like reduction and in relation to this space. This creates an interaction between what is depicted and the surface as space. The high degree of abstraction and the immediacy and sensual radiance of the works are one.
Iris de Pasqua, 2003, Gouache auf Japanpapier, 41 x 35 cm
In the exhibition, the gallery is showing works from the Iris series, among others, which the artist created in a multitude of variations with almost ritual regularity, always at Easter time in his house in Folquer in the west of Catalonia. Nature is the starting point, the motif of the iris is representative of it, each variation is captured in this process in its pure colourful appearance and at the same time becomes the prototype of its genre.
Exhibition dates: Thursday, 16 September to Thursday, 4 November 2021 – ATTENTION: extended until Wednesday, 8 December 2021
To the Gallery
Exhibition Joan Hernández Pijuan – Galerie Dittmar | Contemporary Art – Zeitgenössische Kunst in Berlin – ART at Berlin
