Gratitude is the concept and attitude that she wants to transmit and that emanates from the behavior of Fina Miralles (Sabadell, 1950). Gratitude because, he explains, “the experience of life is fantastic”, “for the education that my parents gave me” and for having dedicated himself to what he felt and wanted to do, because “being an artist protects you and gives you a lot, because doing it makes you. It is wonderful to be an artist, in the next life, I ask myself to be one again.” He considers the bad experiences, the pain and the renunciations rewarded when a few years ago he closed his artistic career with the Memorial painting cycle, from 1996. These also conclude the tour of his painting and work on paper that can be visited at Espais VolArt of the Vila Casas Foundation.
Since he retired to Cadaqués in 1999, where he went “to fold candles” after a life marked by pilgrimage, he speaks of his work as a legacy, which he actually donated to the Museu d’Art of Sabadell that year – almost three thousand pieces between works and documentary and photographic archive – and that now belongs to others, “because I have always been an artist of culture, and not of the market.” She adds that everything she has done “is a song to life, to nature, but that she needs the gaze of others, if not, it has no meaning.”
Nature has always been closely linked to her work, to the point of stating that “a woman of the earth is what defines me most.” His first contact takes place in his childhood and the land that his mother owned in Balaguer. Her parents died when she was 25 years old, and she learned to live with the presence of their dead and her losses: “In Sabadell we were Martians. Well, and in Catalonia, and in Spain. I was always the odd one out, but my parents respected me and let me be who I wanted to be. Luckily, they were very sensitive and had traveled a lot.” Her independence also did not fit well at the Faculty of Fine Arts of Barcelona, ??where she ended up “tired of academicism clipping your wings,” although she acknowledges that “I did learn a lot of technique for drawing and painting.”
On the sidelines, she did “her things,” and she remembers with emotion the space of freedom that came with the end of the Mostra d’Art de l’Hospitalet de Llobregat in 1972. There she participated with an obvious declaration of principles, Natura Morta, a board with shells, grass, sand, firewood, water, algae, leaves and stones, with which she would begin a career that would lead her to become a pioneer and reference in conceptual art: “We did it without knowing that it was conceptual, for us, who were four cats, they were actions and montages,” he remembers.
“I was in Filling Comediants,” which meant meeting active people, like Bigas Luna, and exhibiting at the Sala Vinçon, which he also directed since 1974 for several years. Some of the steps that followed were his contribution to the creation of Espai 10 of the Fundació Miró or his participation in the 1977 Paris Biennale, invited by Victoria Combalía, and in Venice, a year later. Of special significance was her exhibition in 1979 at the Fundació Miró, with which she felt “very respected as an artist.” In 2020, the Macba dedicated a retrospective to him, curated by Teresa Grandas, which evidenced his prominent role in Catalan and state art, and in 2018 he received the Premi Nacional d’Arts Visuals de Catalunya, in recognition of a long series of exhibitions, actions and publications.
After the experiences shared with the legendary Grup de Treball, which included names like Francesc Torres, Jordi Benito, Àngels Ribé or Francesc Abad, “I needed my way, I have always been a loner, even now that I am already a supportive yaya.” In the eighties, thanks to the sale of a tapestry belonging to his mother that had belonged to his grandfather, an engineer and diplomat, he was able to pay for a trip to South America. She also gave up the land of Serrallonga, another maternal inheritance of hers, to pay for a displacement that would last from 1983 to 1986. He comments that “everything turned around there. If the conceptual was the world of ideas, I went to the world of emotions. “I met a homeopath who made me jump into the abyss.”
Upon returning, he lived in Barcelona, ??Paris and Normandy before settling in Cadaqués. Testimony of that leap are the paintings and works on paper that are claimed in the Espais VolArt exhibition, and that show their connection with nature here populated with a symbolism that wants to investigate the atavistic and the invisible, in the force of the life and freedom that never ceases to amaze him.
Fine Mirrors. From beyond time. Espais VolArt Vila Casas Foundation. Barcelona Curated by Maia Creus and M. Lluïsa Faxedas. www.fundaciovilacasas.com. Until January 14.
