Benet Ferrer
Benet Ferrer, who often signed his work simply Benet, was a ceramicist who gave his medium a conceptual dimension and a Conceptual artist who never forgot matter. Born in Sabadell in 1945, he passed away in that same town a few days ago. During the sixties and seventies he was part of various collective initiatives that supported the avant-garde and Conceptual art in Catalonia, such as the Grup Gallot and Sala Tres in Sabadell, and Galeria G in Barcelona. His hyperrealist clay objects reflect some of the contradictions of a world that has sold out to capitalism and advertising. Domestic plungers with bent handles as if they were being used, buckets with the name of the paint they contain or cloths ‘like the ones I use in the workshop to wipe the clay from my hands’. With his experimental nature and subtle irony, Ferrer liked to explore the formal and poetic dimension of objects. As he explained in a 1992 interview: ‘All my objects belong to an existing reality because they are elements of everyday use, not because they are a replica. I change their utility, while at the same time reflecting on the process.’
MACBA Collection
The MACBA Collection focuses on the art of the period spanning the second half of the twentieth century to the present. Without ignoring the specificity of any moment, it centres on what the notion of artistic contemporaneity and its multiplicity of languages has meant during the last decades.
