D'ara i d'abans, 1987
In his long career, Antoni Clavé was influenced by different schools and trends. In the fifties and sixties, he developed his well-known series of warriors, kings, queens and knights in a style close to Expressionism and with a foot in Surrealism. In the late sixties, however, he embraced Informalist abstraction. In the seventies and eighties, he focused on experiments in collage and the incorporation of various techniques and elements, while always retaining some figurative element. The MACBA Collection includes works from all these different periods.
Clavé’s canvases are colourful and with a marked taste for experimentation, both in terms of technique as well as form and texture. Clavé incorporates signs, circles, reliefs, drips, letters, masks and collaged paper. After 1975, he focused on the construction of backgrounds that, through trompe-l’oeil, simulate folded and superimposed paper, such as the 1987 work, D’ara i d’abans (From Now and Before). His work from the eighties typifies this approach, while he also experimented with collage and crumpled paper to which he applied aerosol spray paint. These are his papier froissé, a technique achieved by chance but which he managed to turn into a signature element. Although collages, this does not prevent them from playing with light in a clearly pictorial way. The critic Daniel Giralt-Miracle described the whole of Clavé’s work as ‘an abstraction with figurative references; a lyrical abstraction’.
Technical details
- Original title:
- D'ara i d'abans
- Registration number:
- 0001
- Artist:
- Clavé, Antoni
- Date created:
- 1987
- Date acquired:
- 1987
- Fonds:
- MACBA Collection. MACBA Foundation
- Object type:
- Painting
- Media:
- Paper, acrylic, ink and pencil on canvas
- Dimensions:
- 195 x 264.5 cm (height x width)
- Credits:
- MACBA Collection. MACBA Foundation. Gift of Sala Gaspar-Antoni Clavé
- Copyright:
- © Antoni Clavé, VEGAP, Barcelona
- It has accessibility resources:
- No
The MACBA Collection features Catalan, Spanish and international art and, although it includes works from the 1920s onwards, its primary focus is on the period between the 1960s and the present.
For more information on the work or the artist, please consult MACBA's Library. To request a loan of the work, please write to colleccio [at] macba.cat.
If you need a high resolution image of the work, you must submit an image loan request.
