Alberto Fabra Biography
Alberto Fabra (1920 - 2011) was born in Buenos Aires in 1920. Together with Ramon Rogent and the brothers J. Fín and Javier Vilató, Picasso's two nephews, he formed the first group of avant-garde painters in Catalonia. His early paintings, full of life, linked to the work of Cézanne as well as that of the Fauves and contained much more restlessness than the conventional painting of the time, so current and anecdotal. In 1943, after their first exhibition at the Galerias Reig in Barcelona, they were recognized by critics and, in 1945, they received a scholarship from the French Institute of Barcelona to spend a year in the French capital. They thus settled permanently in the city of Paris, leaving an important void in the Barcelona artistic panorama. Once finished with the group, Fabra begins an intense and new stage of collaboration with the world of cinema together with the Hungarian set designer Alexandre Trauner. More than fifty years old, he placed himself close to the members of the Groupe de Recherche d'Art Visuel (GRAV), composed mostly of Argentine artists, and from whom he collected part of his poetry. In Spain he exhibited his kinetic works at the Serrallonga gallery in Barcelona (1977), at the SEN gallery in Madrid (1971) and, subsequently, at the Juana de Aizpuru gallery in Seville (1972). One more step and his painting acquires impressionist and violent accents (acrylics and vertical landscapes), leaving the figurative style behind. He exhibited in several Parisian galleries, participated in the Salon des Realités Nouvelles where he became friends with the French informalist Pierre Soulages; then his exhibitions travel around Geneva, Luxembourg, Worms, Düsseldorf, Milan, Bergamo.
