Joan hernandez pijuan biography

Born in 1931 in Barcelona, ​​Joan Hernández Pijuan studied at La Llotja, the School of Arts and Crafts of Barcelona, ​​as well as at the School of Fine Arts of Barcelona. Shortly after, he moved to Paris to continue his training at the city’s École de Beaux-Arts. His pictorial journey began with an expressionist style, very present in his first exhibitions at the beginning of the 1950s, something that would gradually become more structured over time. It was in the 1960s when his gestural style gave way to a more geometric and anatomical line, first from still life, and later, in the 1970s, from landscape.

He abandoned this geometric style to continue developing his work from informalism from the 1980s. And it was in his last stage, from the 1990s, that the outstanding element was color as well as density and the way of working the material on the canvas. For this reason, abstraction is present in a large part of his work, combining mathematical references with the intrinsic elements of painting, such as stripes of color, transparencies or textures.

Regarding his exhibition career, Pijuan has shown his work, both individually and collectively, around the world. Cities such as Paris, Zurich, Johannesburg, Geneva, Osaka, Madrid, Barcelona or New York stand out, among others. We can also find his works in more than sixty collections and museums. And, among other awards, in 1981 he received the National Prize for Plastic Arts of Spain and, in 1985, the Cross of Sant Jordi.

We dedicated an exhibition called ‘The measurement of time, the course of painting’ to the Suñol Foundation in 2010. It included multiple works by the author from the Suñol Soler Collection and others loaned by institutions.

Joan Hernández Pijuan, a leading figure in Catalan and Spanish minimalism in the latter part of the 20th century, studied at Barcelona’s Escola d’Arts i Oficis de la Llotja and Escola de Belles Arts, before moving to Paris in 1957, where he studied engraving and lithography at the École des Beaux-Arts. 

Although his early work was close to gestural expressionism, he soon adopted a geometric figuration dominated by colour fields and by the presence of solitary objects such as fruit, glasses, eggs and scissors. Treated with elegance and mysticism, colour was always central to his work. On a smooth ground with passages of grey and green, Hernández Pijuan incorporated elements and mathematical references such as grids or metric tapes. Colour strips, tonal gradation, transparencies, textures and resonant light are all elements that typify the artist's work, which in the eighties incorporated elements such as the profile of a cypress tree, the furrows of the plough or the shape of a leaf, without ever abandoning abstraction. In the late eighties, Hernández Pijuan returned to Informalism, eventually developing a style of painting characterised exclusively by the use of a black-and-white palette. Atmospheric though austere, the work becomes an exercise in spirituality and inner contemplation. He also continued his work as a printmaker, producing carefully executed, monochromatic grids in series.

Following his first solo exhibition at the Museu de Mataró in 1955, he exhibited throughout Spain and internationally. His numerous retrospectives include those at the Centre Cultural Tecla Sala, Hospitalet de Llobregat (1992), Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid (1993), MACBA, Barcelona (2003) and Museum of Modern Art, Moscow (2011). His work features in the collections of Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; National Gallery, Montreal; Museo de Arte Moderno, Buenos Aires; Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid; and MACBA, Barcelona, among others.

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Joan Hernández Pijuan was born in 1931 in Barcelona, Spain, where he died in 2005.

The Catalan artist Joan Hernández Pijuan, who died in 2005, is one of the most important representatives of contemporary Spanish painting. In exhibition “Fundamental Painting” in 2015 Gallery Renate Bender focuses above all on the early work of the artist, who, when referring to his own artistic path, said that it began to take shape in the 1970s. Monochrome layers of color with figurative referential objects, for example a tree, were replaced in the 1980s by floral and other botanical elements. Influenced by the light and landscape of Spain, he used a kind of archaic shorthand to outline objects, such as a tree or a house, which he drew with a carbon pencil into thick layers of oil paint or applied with a brush onto delicate paper. In the last years of his life his work underwent a process of ever increasing reduction. What appears to be a monochrome pictorial space is framed by a few peripheral elements: hints of paths and borders of fields in the landscape.

pdf biography print version

pdf exhibition catalog "Fundamental Painting", - 2015

pdf exhibition brochure "Fundamental Painting", - 2015

pdf exhibition brochure "Joan Hernández Pijuan - Bilder einer Landschaft", 2011

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