Joan Hernández Pijuan

Joan Hernández Pijuan, born in Barcelona in 1931 and died in the same city in 2005, was a prominent Spanish artist who studied at the Escola d'Arts i Oficis de la Llotja and the Escola de Belles Arts de Barcelona before moving to Paris in 1957 to study engraving and lithography at the École de Beaux-Arts. Although he began close to Gestural Expressionism, he soon adopted geometric figuration, which included fields of color and solitary objects such as fruit, glasses, eggs, and scissors. Color was always one of the most important elements of his work, treated with great elegance and mysticism. In the 1980s, Hernández Pijuan added forms such as the profile of a cypress tree, plow furrows, or the silhouette of a leaf, without ever abandoning abstraction. At the end of that decade, he returned to Informalism and developed a painting characterized by the exclusive use of a black and white palette. With an atmospheric and austere body of work, he transformed painting into an exercise in spirituality and inner contemplation. He also excelled as a printmaker, with a careful work of plot and serial elements, also monochromatic. Since his first solo exhibition at the Museu de Mataró in 1955, Hernández Pijuan has exhibited in art spaces in Spain and abroad. Notable retrospectives dedicated to the artist include those at the Centre Cultural Tecla Sala in L'Hospitalet de Llobregat (1992), the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid (1993), the MACBA in Barcelona (2003), and the Museum of Modern Art in Moscow (2011). His work can be found in collections such as the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the National Gallery in Montreal, the Museum of Modern Art in Buenos Aires, the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid, and the MACBA in Barcelona.