JOSEP PUIGMARTI VALLS (Monistrol de Calders, 1932... Lot 28

JOSEP PUIGMARTI VALLS (Monistrol de Calders, 1932 - Sitges, 2020). "Big-Bang Pearl, Sitges, 2016. Oil on canvas. Signed and dated in the lower right corner. Signed, dated and titled on the back. Measurements: 100 x 81 cm. The painter and sculptor Josep Puigmartí is considered one of the most prolific and transgressive artists of European plastic art in the second half of the 20th century. Born in Monistrol de Calders (Barcelona) in 1932, Josep Puigmartí was an artist with a wide and diverse career, as he ventured into styles such as expressionist schematism, eroticism, pop-art and even surrealism. A "wanderer around the world", as he liked to call himself, Puigmartí also bequeathed a prolific body of work that he exhibited in galleries and museums in countries such as France, Belgium, Switzerland, the United States, China and the United Arab Emirates. Self-taught, Puigmartí made a dazzling but brief appearance on the Barcelona painting scene, making his name in 1956 at the then influential Galería Syra, in the modernist Casa Batlló in Barcelona, with the support of the critic Sebastià Gasch in the catalogue. However, his adventurous and wandering nature prompted him to set off for Paris, later touring Sweden, Denmark and Italy, where he held several exhibitions between 1962 and 1972 with works influenced by Expressionism, Informalism and Figurativism. Puigmartí continued to maintain some contacts with Catalonia, as he was a regular in the bohemian Cadaqués of the late 1950s and early 1960s, when the territory where Dalí reigned was invaded during the summers by Barcelona's "gauche divine". Between 1972, when he settled in Paris, and his return to Catalonia in 1989, Puigmartí embarked on a long period - including five years in the United States - in which erotic themes prevailed, with the female body as a point of reference, although with a stylistic evolution that took in hyperrealism, surrealism and pop art.