Joan Hernández Pijuan

JOAN HERNÁNDEZ PIJUAN (Barcelona, 1931 - 2005).
"Esbós: Serie des de la casa", n.1, 1990.
Gouache on Japan paper.
Signed and dated in the lower corner.
Presents labels on the back (Joan Prats Gallery / Art Gallery Tàpies).
Measurements: 18,5 x 15 cm; 41,5 x 38 cm (frame).

Joan Hernández Pijuan painted houses as part of his artistic exploration deeply linked to landscape, memory, and poetic evocation. Houses, as well as other elements such as trees, fields or roads, became recurring symbols in his work, which he reduced to a basic essentiality of naïf or directly abstract dyes.

Joan Hernández Pijuan began his training in Barcelona, attending the Schools of La Lonja and Sant Jordi Fine Arts, and then completed his education at the School of Fine Arts in Paris. Appointed professor at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Barcelona in 1981, Hernández Pijuan occupies a unique position among the Spanish artists of the last decades. He began his career practicing a tragic expressionism of great social charge, and in these times he formed, together with the rest of the members of the Sílex Group, the so-called Barcelona School. In the seventies he simplified his expression until he adopted a geometric and calculated figuration, a style that he left behind in the following decade to focus on informalism. His exhibition activity was as wide and diverse as his own artistic creation. During his lifetime he exhibited individually in several Spanish cities as well as in Zurich, Milan, Johannesburg, Cologne, Geneva, New York, Paris and Osaka, among other cities around the world, and in 2003 a major retrospective exhibition was dedicated to him at the MACBA in Barcelona, which was later shown at the Musée d'Art et Histoire de Neuchatel (France), the Konsthalle in Malmö (Sweden) and the Galleria Comunale d'Arte Moderna in Bologna (Italy). Hernández Pijuan was dean of the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Barcelona, and in 2000 he was appointed member of the Royal Academy of San Fernando in Madrid. In 1981 he received the National Prize for Plastic Arts, in 1985 the Sant Jordi Cross and, in 2004, the City of Barcelona Award. He was also awarded the Prize of the General Directorate of Fine Arts at the National Exhibition of Alicante in 1957, the First Prize for Painting "Peintres Residents" in Paris (1958), the "Malibor" Prize at the Biennial of Engraving in Ljubljana (1965), the International Biennial of Engraving in Krakow (1966) and the prize of the editorial office "Vijesnik u Srijedu" in Zagreb (1970). Hernández Pijuan is represented at the MACBA, the Spanish Abstract Art Museum in Cuenca, the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid, the Patio Herreriano Museum in Valladolid and the Basque Museum of Contemporary Art, as well as in foreign centers such as the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Liaunig (Austria), the Helsinki Museum of Contemporary Art in Helsinki, the Helsinki Museum of Fine Arts in Finland, the Helsinki Museum of Contemporary Art in Finland and the Helsinki Museum of Fine Arts in Finland, those of Contemporary Art of Helsinki and Luxembourg, the Kulturstiftung of Bad Homburg (Austria), the Yamaguchi Gallery of Osaka (Japan), the Palace of Fine Arts of Brussels, the National Gallery of Montreal, the Museum of Modern Art of Buenos Aires and the Sztuki Museum of Lodz (Poland).