Hernández Pijuan, Joan.
Works of the artist.
Hernández Pijuan, Joan
Joan Hernández Pijuan was born in Barcelona in 1931 and died in 2005 in the same city.
He began his training as a painter in 1945, studying at the Llotja de Barcelona for two years. In 1957, he moved to Paris where he studied engraving and lithography at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. During his stay in the French capital, he came in direct contact with informalist art, an artistic style which the artist would embrace throughout the 1960s.
However, from 1966 onwards Pijuan became interested in empty surfaces and the relationship between space and the object. He also approached still life, depicting at times objects such as apples, eggs, or cups.
In 1972 he started to explore landscape painting, using the precision of a ruler to create space. Soon after though, he chose to represent landscapes that accentuated the fiction of perspective through textures, gradients and colors.
In 1976 he explored color, light and movement in the limited space of a landscape. That year he was also hired as a teacher at the Sant Jordi School of Fine Arts.
During 1981 and 1982 Pijuan developed a series where he expressed his concern with color arrangement. In this decade, his work is known to represent different theoretical experiments. As a result, his brushstrokes abandoned immediacy, while they appeared based on small stains that established visual trajectories. Landscape came to illustrate the global in the individual and to embrace the images of plants and flowers, creating the renown series of \"ciprés\".
In 1989 he was appointed professor of painting at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Barcelona.
In the 1990s, Pijuan worked on large surfaces and with hardly any iconographic elements. Starting from a central mass of oil paint and industrial enamels, he spread the material and modulated it on the canvas, leaving very dense areas in the center and others with hardly any texture at the edges of the canvas. Light and darkness contested the occupied and empty spaces. This entire surface was crisscrossed by lines that intertwined like a metallic mesh or paths that met.
In 2000 Pijuan was appointed a member of the Real Academia de San Fernando in Madrid..
During his artistic career Pijuan received various awards such as the National Prize for Plastic Arts (1981), the Creu de Sant Jordi (1985), the City of Barcelona Prize (2004) and the National Graphic Art Prize (2005). His works can also be found in various national and international museums such as the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Barcelona, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Yamaguchi Gallery in Osaka, Japan, and the Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires, among others.
