271 - FERRÁN GARCÍA SEVILLA (Palma de Mallorca, 1949).

FERRÁN GARCÍA SEVILLA (Palma de Mallorca, 1949). "Snake", Basel 83. Mixed media on paper. Presents Arco 1984 stamp on the back. Signed, dated and located (Basel) in the lower right area. Measurements: 27,5 x 21 cm. Initially linked to the theory and criticism of art, García Sevilla has been a professor of Fine Arts in several universities. He made his individual debut in 1972. After starting his artistic career in conceptual art, he ended up in painting and graphics, framed in the so-called postmodern art. He usually arranges well-defined figures, often anthropomorphic, on neutral backgrounds or with insistently repeated motifs. He uses rich, vivid and contrasting chromatic ranges, with a simplified language, sometimes close to primitive art. García Sevilla's enormous paintings, his forceful images, his often brutal humor, the texts that occupy part of the surface of these paintings, his expressive capacity, have become familiar to Spanish viewers as well as to those of other countries. Endowed with an imagination almost as prodigious as his will, García Sevilla is a veritable machine for producing paintings, for devouring and transforming images. All this finds its translation in the verbal plane: since his famous interview with Kevin Power, collected in the latter's book "Conversations with..." (1985), nobody doubts that García Sevilla is one of the Spanish painters who has more things to say, and who, under an appearance of improvisation and, if necessary, delirium, gives more turns to the meaning of his work. In this aspect, his case is reminiscent of that of Miró, to whom he has always shown great admiration. He has had solo exhibitions in Europe and the United States, and participated in group exhibitions in Hamburg, Vienna, Munich, St. Petersburg, Lisbon, and several Spanish cities, as well as in the Documenta in Kassel (1987) and the Biennials of Istanbul (1989) and São Paulo (1996). Among the personal exhibitions he has held in recent years are those at the Elga Wimmer Gallery in New York (1992), the Thomas Netusil Kunsthandel in Vienna (2000) and the Fúcares gallery in Madrid (2008). García Sevilla is represented at the Centre Pompidou in Paris - National Museum of Modern Art, the Reina Sofía National Museum, the MACBA in Barcelona, the Atlantic Center of Modern Art in Las Palmas, the CaixaForum in Barcelona, the Suñol Foundation, the Ico Collections Museum, the Es Baluard in Palma de Mallorca, the IVAM in Valencia, the Juan March Foundation, the Patio Herreriano Museum in Valladolid, the ARTIUM in Vitoria and the MuHKA in Antwerp.