Joan Brossa

JOAN BROSSA CUERVO (Barcelona, 1919 - 1998) .
"Visual poem", 1989.
Lithography on paper. Copy 34/50.
Signed and justified at the bottom.
Measurements: 48,5 x 36,5 cm; 60 x 48 cm (frame).
Brossa was a poet for whom there were no genre distinctions (literary, scenic, visual, objectual...), who began writing during the Civil War. He was co-founder of "Dau al Set" together with Ponç, Tàpies, Ciuxart and Tharrats, and throughout his career he received the Lletra d'Or, City of Barcelona, the UNESCO Picasso Medal, the National Plastic Arts Award, the Gold Medal for Merit in Fine Arts and the National Theater Award from the Generalitat. In all of his work is present the concept of art as visuality, as spectacle. His visual poetry and his posters constitute the best known part of his work, to the point that in this field Brossa became a world reference. From the seventies onwards he manipulated objects to deepen their meaning, or to represent the bare concept, through everyday objects and poems. All of Brossa's poetry is full of references to visuality, and perhaps that is why he also entered the world of plastic art. From his beginnings, in 1941, Brossa created visual poems of a calligrammatic type. His first object, "Escorça", a true "objet trouvé", dates from 1943. And 1951 is the first object made expressly, from the association of two distant realities (in this case a hammer and a letter composed of two others). But it is from 1959 that the poet intensifies his visual research with the "Suites de poésie visuelle" (Suites of visual poetry). In these fragile compositions will already be the germ of many of the future visual poems. During the sixties and, more specifically, during the seventies, the best known Brossian visual poems and objects were conceived and later published. Their subject matter will be the same as that of the poems: socio-political denunciation, reflection on the meaning of words and things, surprising games, etc. But the material will no longer be only words, but letters and other elements loved by Brossa such as Fregoli, carnival, sleight of hand, etc. It will be from the exhibition at the Fundació Miró in Barcelona in 1986, "Joan Brossa o les paraules són les cosas", and the anthology at the MNCA Reina Sofia in 1991, when the poet begins to be recognized in the country and worldwide. This allowed him to carry out a series of more complex projects, which resulted in installations and what he called corporeal poems, or interventions on urban spaces.