Xavier Grau, untitled, 2014, 170 x 200 cm.
After an absence of six years and on the heels of his recent survey exhibition at the Museu Can Framis of the Fundació Vila Casas in Barcelona, Grau returns to the gallery with an exhibition of recent paintings on canvas and panel in large, medium and small formats, and a series of drawings on paper that evidence the creative process, the artist’s way of thinking and the origin of his imagery. One of the principal painters of his generation, Grau was a member of a group of artists created in Barcelona in the mid 1970s surrounding the art journal “Trama”, whose concept was the recovery of painting as opposition to the experimental developments of conceptualism, but from the perspective of abstraction. Having come of age in the post-war years, Grau has inherited the distinctive character of Abstract Expressionism, a source of expressive power and emotional honesty. Closely defined with the New York School and in particular with references to De Kooning, Gorky and Guston, Grau’s painitng veers towards an abstraction that maintains unaltered the internal tension between colour and drawing, without reducing its chromatic vivacity nor the movement of its surfaces, which are contained by the rythm and marked by the forms that articulate their internal structure. These are works where the colour establishes a dialogue with the drawing, where the tension between the surface and the background creates a state of expectancy that renders in the composition a great dynamic presence.
His work can be found in the most prestigious institutions, including La Fundació Juan March, the IVAM, the MACBA, The Spanish Abstract Art Museum, Cuenca, the Fundació "la Caixa", Barcelona and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, amongst others.
