Miquel Barceló

Felanitx, 1957

Miquel Barceló (born 1957) is a Spanish painter from Felanitx, Mallorca. After having studied at the Arts and Crafts School of Palma for two years, he enrolled at the Fine Arts School of Barcelona in 1974. A year later he returned to Mallorca to participate in the happenings and actions of protest of the group “Taller Lunatic“, a conceptual avant-garde group.

A year after his return to Majorca he had his first one-man show at the Palma Museum. Initially the Avant-garde, Art Brut and American abstract Expressionism influenced Barceló’s work; on the other hand he was always particularly interested in the Baroque paintings. Dubuffet inspired Barceló in adopting an experimental attitude.

Throughout the 1980s, he travelled extensively across Europe, the United States and West Africa – always returning to Paris which became a second home and where he set up a second studio. Extremely fascinated by Mali, a third studio was installed in Segou. The time Barceló spent in different countries, his nomadism or peripatetic habits essentially influenced and inspired his work, most strongly the impressions of West Africa: the power...