Miquel Barceló and the Written Worlds Solo exhibition at the DOX Centre for Contemporary Art

Miquel Barceló (Felanitx, Mallorca, 1957) belongs to a generation of Spanish artists that became internationally known in the 1980s and 1990s and which includes other painters, such as Juan Uslé, and some sculptors, such as Cristina Iglesias and Juan Muñoz.

Miquel Barceló and the Written Worlds is the artist’s first-ever presentation in the Czech Republic, and it focuses on his intense and long-standing relationship with literature. This relation has been a recurring subject at different points in his career, which spans more than four decades and which will be explored through paintings, ceramics, watercolours, bronzes, prints, and books.

After Barceló became known internationally, following his participation in documenta 7 (1982) and the Aperto section of the Venice Biennale (1984), he painted a series of monumental Libraries, which included self-portraits of him reading or sleeping next to empty bottles and open books. One can read the names of the writers he admired on the spines of the books on the library shelves. He also titled some of his works with names from well-known works of literature, such as Ahab and Hamlet, and several gigantic still lifes bear reference to books by his favourite authors, such as Francis Scott Fitzgerald and José Lezama Lima.