Antoni Clave' Biography
Antoni Clavé was born in Barcelona in 1913.
An artist with multiple personalities and always looking for new experiments, he defined himself as an "art craftsman" capable of expressing himself through sculpture, engraving and scenography. From the early years of his training, Clavé was interested in figuration, but then gradually abandoned this tendency to move towards abstract tendencies.
Clavé was particularly fascinated by the manual aspect of art and used multiple techniques, such as tempera, glue and drawing. In the 1930s, he dedicated himself to the first experiments with collages of different materials, thus developing the ability to use every technique acquired to understand the world.
After fighting for the Republican Army in the Spanish Civil War, Clavé took refuge in France in 1939 and settled in Paris, where he began working as an illustrator. In the French capital he held his first solo exhibition a year later at the Au sans Pareil bookshop, the same place where artists of the Dada movement, such as Max Ernst, performed.
In 1944, Clavé met Picasso and created figurative works inspired by the Spanish master's series of Harlequins, Children and Still Lifes.
In the 1950s, he participated in numerous international exhibitions, receiving important recognitions, including the UNESCO graphics prize at the 28th Venice Art Biennale in 1956, the Matarasso prize at the 4th Sao Paulo Biennial in Brazil in 1957 and the prize from the Kamakura Museum at the Tokyo Graphics Biennial in 1958.
The Spanish pavilion of the 1984 Venice Biennale was entirely dedicated to him.
Today, his works enrich the collections of important institutions around the world, such as the Fine Art Museum in San Francisco, the Tate and the British Museum in London, the Musée d'Art Moderne in Paris, the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo and the Museo Nacional de Arte de Reina Sofia in Madrid.
After the artist's death in 2005, major retrospectives were organized at the Fondation Fernet-Branca in Saint-Louis in 2006 and at the Galerie Beyeler in Basel in 2008.
