Magda Bolumar

MAGDA BOLUMAR CHERTÓ (Caldes d'Estrac, Barcelona, 1934).
Untitled, 1995.
Mixed media on thick paper.
Signed and dated in the lower margin.
Measurements: 26 x 35 cm; 47 x 54 cm (frame).
Magda Bolumar entered in 1948 in the studio of the painter Rafael Estrany, disciple of James Ensor, studying later in the School of Arts and Crafts of Mataró. In 1954 she contacted some members of the group Dau al Set and the sculptor Moisés Villelia, one of the architects of the group Arte Actual, whom she married, initiating a joint investigation on the primary materials in art. Magda Bolumar was especially known for the Xarpelleres, which she exhibited for the first time in Barcelona in 1960. In the Xarpelleres, matter and texture have a special importance, which connects these works with Informalism. However, Magda Bolumar's works have an essentially constructivist sense, since the structure acquires in them the main protagonism from the tension of the threads with which they are made. Cirici Pellicer wrote that, unlike the works of informalist artists such as Burri or Millares, as opposed to dramatism or denunciation, "in Magda Bolumar's work, the textile serves for the construction of a new cosmos, it manifests the need to "reorder" the world through the weft of the threads".1 Mª Luisa Borrás wrote that "the magnificent "xarpelleres" of this artist manifest an overwhelming liberation of forces, cerebral in their majority, that end in tensions of warp in weft, starry or parallelisms revealing an intellectual liberation, of ingenuity and constructive rigor". Neither does the artist see her work within Informalism, but the need to turn artists into followers of the great male names, considered by canonical history as the only valid ones, has forced the meaning of the matter-avant-garde relationship, making it necessarily go through a reading from Informalism at that moment of Spanish art". With the embroidery of her "xarpelleres", Magda Bolumar seeks to approach life poetically, as Joan Brossa said in a text dedicated to one of the artist's paintings, in which he emphasized the lyrical sense of these textile structures: "El marc/ fa de tambor/per a bordar el sac" (Brossa, 1965).