Agustí Puig Exhibition
Franklin Bowles Galleries -New York
This event has ended.
As a young art student, Agustí Puig learned his craft at several artists’ ateliers and at the Escola Massana Centre d’Art i Disseny and Cercle Artístic Sant Lluc schools in Barcelona. His work follows a direction related to Alberto Giacometti, Joan Miró and Jean DuBuffet and he is certainly in dialogue with the foremost Spanish artist Antoni Tàpies who launched the Art Informal Movement of Post-War Spain.
Painting in a style known as pintura matèrica, in which non-traditional art materials are incorporated, Puig’s art has alchemical-transformative qualities for both the artist and viewer.
The thick and almost brutal application of paint, administered by the artist as though in a trance-like state, speaks to the studio as a Zen temple and painting as a means of freedom through physical expression. Much as the American Abstract Expressionists in the 1950s discovered themselves in their painting, so the artists of COBRA in the Netherlands, and Gutai in Japan, found art a liberating media that enabled them to discuss issues that they could not, or were reluctant to, put into words. Using an earthy palette- ochre, brilliant white, fiery red, terracotta, ash and charcoal - Puig choreographs a calligraphic dance while pouring buckets of thick paint in fluid lines that softly create abstracted images of the human form thick with layers and built up texture. Scraping and scarring the canvases, dripping and working with brooms as paint brushes, these very physical methods free the painter and give him a more child-like and authentic approach to the creative process. Puig is an “action painter” in the spirit of Jackson Pollock, Sam Francis, Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, Lee Krasner and Joan Mitchell.
Puig now works in a textile factory that has been converted into a three-story studio with ceilings over 18-feet high with beautiful Mediterranean light coming through the high windows. His studio affords him the ability to produce multiple works including many that are monumental in scale.
Media
Schedule
from December 01, 2014 to December 31, 2014