Joan Josep Tharrats Biography

Girona, 1918 – Barcelona, 2001

Spanish painter, engraver and historian of the Spanish art. He is one of the maximum exponents of the UNFORMALISTIC art in Spain.

He has carried out numerous mosaics, sculptures and ceramics, which indicates his worry for integrating his art into the architecture, the planning and the landscape. In the field of the engraving he invented the procedure of the "maculatura", mixture of monotype, overprinting, inflamed and manual painting.

He was founder of the group Dau al Set in 1948, with what he contributed towards laying the foundations of the plastic renewal from Barcelona. Simultaneously he founded the magazine that took the same name, whose texts he wrote at the same time as he directed the edition until he created a book-object of very high quality. After a related surrealist stage with the Dau al Set, he moved to the informalism in 1954, ordinary ‘tachista’ style that gives more importance to the stain than to the matter, the gestualidad or the space. The colors of his works are warm, of Mediterranean influence.

He carried out his studies among Béziers, Girona and Barcelona. Here in 1935 he started his studies in the school Massana, but the Spanish Civil War broke his studies up to 1942, when he reestarted his artistic activity.

In 1950 he carried out his first individual exhibition in the galleries Jardín of Barcelona. From 1954 he exposed regularly in the Sala Gaspar of Barcelona, as well as in 1955 in Stockholm and New York, in 1959 in the V Biennial of São Paulo and in the Biennials of Venice of 1960 and 1964. In 1966 he founded the Association of Current Artists. In 1983 received the Cross of Sant Jordi de la Generalitat of Catalonia and in 1994 the National Prize of Plastic Arts of the Ministry of Culture of Spain, depositing that same year in the Real Academy of Fine Arts of Sant Jordi.

His work can be seen, among others, in the following MUSEUMS and COLLECTIONS

- Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) New York.
- Museum Guggenheim, New York.
- Tate Gallery, London.
- Museum of Modern Art, Barcelona.
- National Museum Art Center Queen Sofia (MNCARS), Madrid.