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Although he was active during decades that were dominated by the polarities between pictorial claims and conceptual practices, Joan Hernández Pijuan (Barcelona, 1931–2005) kept his work on the fringes of stylistic movements and generational groups. Instead, the artist devoted himself to the quest for his own pictorial language, always linked to abstraction and terrestrially grounded in the landscape. To Hernández Pijuan, painting was an empirical form of knowledge. It was the means through which he embarked an ongoing dialogue between subjective experience, personal memory and the plasticity of materials, in a process of ongoing experimentation with the formal possibilities of the pictorial space.

Rather than taking an anthological approach, the exhibition Joan Hernández Pijuan. Revisiting a Familiar Place, 1972–2002 offered an overview of the most significant moments in the artist’s career. For this purpose, 140 works were brought together, including paintings, drawings and prints.

Through about one hundred and forty works – paintings,
drawings and engravings –, the exhibition brings together the milestones in the evolution of the artistic career of Joan Hernández Pijuan (Barcelona, 1931), from the seventies to the present day. Faithful to his beginnings in abstraction, his work bears witness to the most substantial pictorial changes that have taken place in the last three decades, yet he never belonged to any tendency or generation.

Throughout his career, he has dealt with subjects like space, memory, landscape or the void, taking as a central theme an exhaustive analysis of the components of painting and, in short, an understanding of painting as a form of knowledge.

Itinerances

18 JUNE - 14 SEP. 2003 MAHN Musée d'Art et d'histoire de Neuchatel
22 JAN. - 23 MAR. 2003 Museum galleries
22 NOV. 2003 - 25 JAN. 2004 Malmö Konsthall