Miquel Barceló

Galerie Bruno Bischofberger, Zürich
Galleri Haaken, Oslo
Private Collection (acquired from the above in 1996)
Sale: Sotheby's, London, Contemporary Art, 6 February 2004, Lot 192
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner

Trent, Galleria Civica d'Arte Contemporaneo, Miquel Barceló, 1993
Oslo, Galleri Haaken, Miquel Barceló Malerier-Skulpturer, 1996, illustrated in colour
Trondheim, Kunstmuseum; Bergen, Kunstforening; Barcelona, Palau Reial de Pedralbes; Madrid, Centro Cultural del Conde Duque; Zaragoza, IberCaja; Logroño, La Salle d'Amos Salbador, Oslo, Kommunes Kunstsamlinger, Stenersenmuseet, Contemporary European Painting- North Meets South, 1999-2000, p. 68, illustrated in colour

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the overall tonality is slightly deeper and richer in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. No restoration as apparent when examined under ultra-violet light.
"In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective, qualified opinion. Prospective buyers should also refer to any Important Notices regarding this sale, which are printed in the Sale Catalogue.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF BUSINESS PRINTED IN THE SALE CATALOGUE."

Executed in 1992, Cent Caps (One Hundred Heads) fuses sensorial experience with art, history and culture, culminating in a masterfully resolved work of immense artistic expression that is exemplary of Barcelo's internationally celebrated corpus of work. A picture of endless energy and painterly acumen, Barcelo shapes the surface of Cent Caps, employing the paint with a sculptural plasticity that is wholly individual to his artistic process, leading to the eminent French writer Hervé Guilbert to state that Barcelo is, "the first great painter of the twenty-first century".

 

In 1988 Barcelo travelled to Africa, exploring the west of the country in a trip which had a profound impact on his work. These pieces show him to be absorbing, digesting and expressing the primordial beauty around him, a beauty which is palpable in his work from this fruitful period. By exposing himself into tribal life, Barcelo moved beyond the artistic traditions of his homeland, and achieved a more formal understanding of the themes that have preoccupied him throughout his career. Pulsating with a nascent vitality, Cent Caps presents the viewer with a highly cohesive expression of those pictorial elements that bourgeoned in Africa, and which have since become understood as integral to this artist's conceptually and visually complex lexicon. Piling the canvas with the skulls and carcasses of the animals that would continue to govern his later compositions, Cent Caps elucidates the artist's captivation with themes of mortality, the subject finding its technical expression with the painterly invention that has gained him international acclaim.  In the present work, the barren, highly textured surface - stripped of colour to suggest the desiccation of material by the African sun's penetrating heat - is instantly suggestive of the bullfight, one of Barcelo's most celebrated subjects.  Continuing the theme repeatedly addressed in his bullfights - the fragility of life and inevitability of death, faced equally by man and beast - Barcelo reconnects the viewer through Cent Caps with the tangible thematic arch that runs throughout his entire oeuvre.

 

By taking at his subject the skull, Barcelo quotes his literary and artistic antecedents who have tackled the reality of morality through the depiction of the momento mori. However, whereas those that have gone before him have treated the subject with an observer's distance, Cent Caps presents the viewer with a heightened tangibility. As in his bullfights, here we are aware of an explosive physicality to the work that places him squarely within an art historical lineage of eminent artists from Caravaggio and Goya and Monet.