“A love for his city”, “a piece of our history”, “a great painter from a great town”, is read among the messages that visitors have left in the comments book of the Vives Fierro exhibition. Smell of turpentine, at the Palau Robert, where the life and work of the Catalan painter Antoni Vives Fierro is reviewed, an artist who was born in 1940 and who since then has loved Barcelona like few others, which led him to portray throughout throughout his life fragments of the city’s history from urban landscapes that tend to go unnoticed from everyday perspectives, but that the artist manages to rescue as a work of art.
“The city offers me so many themes that make it inexhaustible,” says the painter. And that becomes clear when entering the exhibition curated by his daughter, the artist Claudia Vives-Fierro. A bookstore in the Raval, a kiss on the Rambla, the Barcelona stock exchange, the Pelayo cinemas and a classic fruit and vegetable stand in La Boquería are some of the paintings that portray the streets of Barcelona and its people.
The exhibition can be seen at the Palau Robert until November 26. A place located in the Eixample district, the neighborhood that for Vives Fierro – to whom the Generalitat awarded the Creu de Sant Jordi in 2002 – best embodies what the city of Barcelona means. “I discovered that my city was neither the Rambla nor the Gothic quarter nor the port nor Tibidabo,” he says. My Barcelona is the Eixample, modernism, the Quadrat d’Or that has now become famous. When I started painting the streets of Bailèn, Girona, Bruc, Mallorca, Provença… everyone told me: ‘Where is this fantastic door? And that grandstand with leaded glass?’”
Although the urban landscapes of Barcelona – and other cities such as Havana, London and Paris – are what stands out most in his extensive career, portraits made by the artist who, despite considering them the most thankless of his profession, are also on display. It has more than 400 completed. A huge female portrait that exclusively occupies one of the walls of the room does not go unnoticed by the visitor. This is Emi, his partner for more than fifty years and who has been fundamental to the artist’s life and work.
Antoni Vives Fierro, a painter who cannot be limited to a single style – halfway between figuration, impressionism and expressionism – managed to mount his first exhibition in 1962 and later his works have been seen in multiple cities in Europe and America. .
