Alfons Borrell

ALFONS BORRELL PALAZÓN (Barcelona, 1931-2020).
Untitled, 1990.
Acrylic and collage on canvas.
Signed and dated in the lower corner and on the back.
Measurements: 81 x 100 cm.

Alfons Borrell is considered one of the maximum exponents of the lyrical abstraction in Spain. Starting from symmetries and geometrical abstractions, his work made incursions into a progressive simplification and the preeminence of a gesturality that is subsumed to the field of color. The latter can be seen in this composition, where lyricism and austerity bring this painting closer to the interior or introspective landscape rather than to the will of representation.

Born in Barcelona but settled in Sabadell as a child, Alfons Borrell trained in the fifties with Hermen Anglada Camarasa in Mallorca and at the Escola de Belles Arts in Barcelona. In 1960 he was part of the Grup Gallot, a collective created in Sabadell that practiced actions halfway between action painting and surrealist automatism that questioned the limits of authorship and the pictorial medium. In 1971, he participated in the creation of Sala Tres in Sabadell. A close friend of Joan Brossa and artists such as Perejaume, throughout his extensive career, his pictorial abstraction has been consolidating as an expressive corpus of great intensity and solidity. Since his first solo exhibitions in the late fifties, Borrell has presented his work in prominent art venues in the country and also in France, Germany, the United States and Japan. The art critic Alexandre Cirici invited him to participate in the inaugural exhibition of the first Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona in the dome of the Coliseum Cinema in 1960. In 1978, he was part of the exhibition Seny i rauxa. 11 artistes catalans at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. Among the numerous retrospectives of his work, those presented at the Centre Cultural Tecla Sala in L'Hospitalet de Llobregat (2006), the Museu d'Art de Sabadell (2007) and the Fundació Joan Miró in Barcelona (2015) stand out.