Miquel Barceló

"Painting is an urge that swallows you whole. You don't know exactly where you're going. You lose yourself completely and you end up doing something you had forgotten, or something you wanted to do without knowing how you got there. A miracle that repeats itself differently each time. It's a primitive thing, a vital thing. I felt it right away when I was painting beside my mother at twelve years old."

—Miquel Barcelo

Acquavella Galleries is pleased to present Miquel Barceló, the renowned Spanish artist's fourth solo exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition presents over two dozen new paintings and a selection of recent ceramic works, featuring the artist's signature use of layered materiality, vivid color, and richly textured surfaces.

Over the past four and a half decades, the Spanish artist Miquel Barcelo (b. 1957) has explored a diverse range of media, including painting, works on paper, ceramic, bronze sculpture, large-scale installation, and performance. In addition to his deep-rooted connection to Spain and his native Mallorca, Barcelo draws inspiration from his global travels, continuously experimenting with new materials and techniques influenced by ancient and contemporary cultural traditions. Throughout his practice, the artist's fascination with the natural world has been central, resulting in textured canvases filled with earthly materiality, tactile surfaces, and compositions inspired by the effects of light and ever-changing colors of the sea.

In his latest series of paintings, Barcelo deepens his engagement with organic subject matter, drawing inspiration from the sea surrounding Mallorca, where he lives and works in addition to Paris. In densely layered surfaces, Barcelo's new "still life" paintings feature scenes filled with tropical fish, crabs, shells, crustaceans, and marine vegetation that emerge from layers of muted chromatic grays in brilliant hues of red and blue. Traces of human presence also appear within these aquatic compositions as Barcelo often incorporates found materials including matchbooks and postage stamps amid hundreds of layers of paint. In Par terre avec as de coeur (2024), for instance, a playing card appears alongside crabs and shells, seamlessly blending into the composition. As Barcelo explains, the process is almost geological, "like waves washing over a beach."

Alongside Barcelo's still lifes are striking underwater scenes, inspired by both the open sea as well as aquariums. Although a lifelong diver, the prescribed environment of the aquarium offers the artist a unique opportunity for experimentation. In works like Scene (2025) and Peixos exotics (2025), Barcelo creates powerful compositions teeming with tropical aquatic life in swirling brilliant color. As the artist observes, an aquarium is a "closed space where colors, shapes, and materials evolve in improbable combinations. For me, that's a good definition of painting."

The exhibition also includes a selection of new paintings from the artist's corrida series, depicting the circular space of the bullfighting ring, which offers Barcelo a similarly enclosed space to experiment. In Reloj parado (2023-2024-2025), two lone figures stand at the center of a yellow ground, encircled in the ring by vibrant reds, greens, and blues. Barcelo builds each composition in multiple layers of saturated color where the dramatic interplay between "life and death" and "light and shadow" unfold.

Barcelo's ceramic practice similarly emerged from his surroundings. He began experimenting with the medium in the 1990s in Mali, where he studied ancient Dogon earthenware techniques unique to the country's central region. Drawn to clay for its humble materiality, he embraced it as a medium of experimentation, describing ceramics as "a form of painting." Barcelo's distinctive forms and contours, molded by the artist's hands, are painted in vivid colors and often revisit the subjects and material qualities of his paintings. In Tectonic (2024), a simple vessel is coated in dense crags as if it slowly emerged from the earth, while in Copinyes (2024), shells and crustaceans appear from soft, bubbling surfaces glazed in violet. These works show Barcelo's expressive and free-wheeling hand, and much like his paintings, they illustrate his engagement with the materials, traditions, and environments endemic to his surroundings.

Miquel Barcelo is accompanied by an illustrated catalogue co-published by Rizzoli.

Miquel Barcelo (b. 1957)

Miquel Barcelo was born in Felanitx, Mallorca in 1957 and currently lives and works in Mallorca, Spain, and Paris, France. The youngest artist to ever show at the Musee du Louvre, Barcelo represented Spain at the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009 and participated in Documenta VII in Kassel, Germany in 1982. He has had retrospectives at renowned institutions, including Centre Pompidou, Paris; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; Museo Rufino Tamayo, Mexico City; the Guggenheim Bilbao, Spain; and is included in many esteemed public and private collections worldwide. Barcelo has had several solo exhibitions in recent years, including one featuring his ceramics at the Museo Internazionale delle Ceramiche, Faenza in 2019, a solo exhibition titled Metamorphosis at the Museo Picasso, Malaga in 2021, and Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery in 2022.