Miquel Barceló

Miquel Barceló (Felanitx, Mallorca, 1957)

Miquel Barceló is one of the most influential contemporary Spanish artists on the international scene.

His academic training was in Palma de Mallorca and Barcelona. Although he has deep ties with Mallorca, the island of his birth, he has found inspiration in other places as well. Hence, he has lived and worked intermittently in Barcelona, Portugal, Palermo, Paris, Geneva, New York, the Himalayas and, especially, Mali.

His nomadic spirit and fascination with the natural world have inspired him to create highly textured canvases that evoke the earthy materiality of Informal Art, as well as compositions that explore the effects of light and changing colours of the sea. Always experimenting with non-traditional materials like volcanic ash, fruits, seaweed, sediments, and homemade pigments, he reveals in his works traces of the fierce energy that drives his creative process.

For Barceló, painting is a visceral way of connecting with the world. His work breaks the bounds of technical limits of representation, which has led him to accept highly ambitious, large-scale public commissions, including the cupula of the Mercat de les Flors theatre in Barcelona (1986), Saint Peter’s chapel in the Mallorca cathedral (2007), and the Human Rights and Alliance of Civilizations Room in the Palais Des Nations in Geneva (2008). A voracious reader since childhood, he has illustrated Dante’s The Divine Comedy (La Divina Comedia, Galaxia Gutenberg, 2016), Goethe’s Faust (Fausto, Galaxia Gutenberg, 2018), and Kafka’s Metamorphosis (La Transformación de Kafka, Galaxia Gutenberg, 2020). Galaxia Gutenberg has also published his illustrated autobiography De la meva vida / De la vida mía (On My Life, Galaxia Gutenberg, 2024).

Barceló’s work has been exhibited, inter alia, in the Queen Sofía National Museum Art Centre, Madrid (1999), the Louvre Museum (2004), the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin (2008), the Bibliothèque nationale de France, and the Musée Picasso in Paris (2016). In 2021 and 2022, he exhibited in Japan (the National Museum of Art Osaka, Mie, Nagasaki, and Tokyo). He has received numerous awards throughout his career, notable amongst which are the Prince of Asturias Award for the Arts (2003) and the Creu de Sant Jordi (St George Cross) of the Generalitat (Government) of Catalonia (2020), as well as being awarded honorary doctorates by the Balearic Island, Pompeu Fabra, and Salamanca universities.