Toni Ricart
A collection of portraits that vindicates the excellence and talent that exists in Barcelona today.
Eighty protagonists of culture and creativity in a city that remains modern and avant-garde.
Printed in duotone by Nova Era.
21×29,7 cm.
184 pages.
texts in Catalan and Spanish.
ISBN 978-84-942372-8-7
35,00€
“Around the nineties, the city knew moments of brilliance in terms of art, culture and creativity, and it seems that this modern and avant-garde spirit has been fading in recent years. Now, in Barcelona, there is no longer the energy of that time, but, on the other hand, there are still many people full of talent. This is the basic reason for this collection of portraits.”
The book Barcelona, retrats de proximitat, a collection of 80 portraits of protagonists of culture and creativity in Barcelona, made by Toni Ricart, has already gone to press.
The well-known printing house Nova Era is in charge of the photocomposition and printing, made with duotone on 135gr. matte coated paper.
The book will be published in early February 2023.
28 scenic, plastic and creative artists interpret with their works, the novel Lo prohibido by Esmeralda Berbel.
The exhibition Interpretar Lo prohibido was initially born from the voice of the activist and writer María LLopis in a course she attended on art and in which she mentions the work Cuídese mucho, by the multidisciplinary artist Sophie Calle. Sophie proposes to more than one hundred artists to interpret a breakup letter she receives by email.
28 artists have created a singular, evocative, multiple work from their artistic point of view in interpreting Lo Prohibido (The Forbidden).
Exhibition works: Laura Jou, Isabel Herrera, Carmen Escudero, Anna Alarcón, Duna Vallés, Mona Endara, Marianna Roigé, José Duarte, Manuel Moranta, Sergi Capellas, David Ruiz, Juan Cardosa, Carolina Conti, Ona Juan, Rut Muñoz, Lara Ubago and Toni Ricart.
We have started a crowdfunding campaign to support the publication of the book of portraits Barcelona, retrats de proximitat, through the Verkami platform.
We encourage you to participate and share the link.
Thank you very much!
BENEDETTA TAGLIABUE, architect.
While I wait for Benedetta in the architecture studio she runs, in the Mercè neighborhood, I am surprised by the silence and peace that reigns there, despite being full of people working. I take the opportunity to admire corners, scale models, different objects, and the light that fills this unique space.
Benedetta radiates a contagious sympathy and joy. She appears with her big smile and her colorful necklaces and clothes, apologizing for the delay. I tell her that I don't mind waiting in such an attractive space and that, besides, today is a special day for me, because hers is the portrait that makes 80, the one that closes my project. She likes that.
—
Benedetta Tagliabue is the principal architect of the architecture studio Miralles Tagliabue EMBT, which she founded together with Enric Miralles in 1991, and president of Fundació Enric Miralles, she is an architect graduated from the Istituto Universitario de Architettura di Venecia (IUAV). She completed her studies in New York and in 1989 she settled in Barcelona. In 2004 she received an honorary doctorate from the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Napier University (Edinburgh). She currently combines her professional work with teaching in international schools and universities. She was a visiting professor in 2012 at GSD Harvard University and in 2011 at Columbia University in New York. From her studio she has designed projects in China, Germany, England and Holland, and other countries. Among her outstanding works are the Spanish Pavilion at the Shanghai Exhibition (2010), the Kālida Center (Maggie's Center) within the modernist complex of the Hospital Sant Pau, the Santa Caterina Market and neighbourhood in Barcelona (1997-2005), the Scottish Parliament Building (1999-2004), the Gas Natural Tower in Barcelona (1999-2006), the University Campus of Vigo (1999-2004) and the Diagonal Mar Park in Barcelona (1995-2002). Her works have received awards such as the International Fellowship, awarded by the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA), in its 2010 edition, the RIBA Jencks Award 2013 and the prestigious Stirling Prize in 2005. In 2014, she joined the jury of the Pritzker Prize. In May 2019, she received the Sant Jordi Cross awarded by the Generalitat de Catalunya for the excellence of her professional practice in the field of architecture worldwide.
Vera has just come from a rehearsal. Today she has a concert with the Cuarteto Casals, one of the most prestigious string quartets in the world, which celebrates its 25th birthday this year.
She tells me that, for her, chamber music is the best music. Playing as a soloist in an orchestra does not fulfill her as much as being part of a quartet. We talk about the importance of the communion between the performer and the audience in concerts, "it's like you doing portraits, you always need someone on the other side", and about the little consideration that classical music has in Spain, if we compare it with other countries like, for example, Germany.
Today they will play Brahms and Haydn, "the father of chamber music". Good concert!
—
Born in Madrid, Vera Martínez Mehner studied at the Escuela Superior de Música Reina Sofía and at the Hochschule für Musik in Cologne. She completed her studies in Germany with a postgraduate degree in chamber music as a member of the Casals Quartet under the tutelage of the Alban Berg Quartet.
She won important prizes such as the First Prize and Special Prize for the best classical interpretation at the Kloster Schöntal International Competition (1995) and the Second Prize at the Henry Wieniawsky International Violin Competition in Poland (1997). As a member of the Casals Quartet she has won First Prizes at the International Competitions in London (2000) and Hamburg (2002) and the National Music Prize in 2006, and as a soloist she has performed with orchestras such as the Santo Domingo Symphony Orchestra, the Chamber Orchestra of the Reina Sofia School of Music, the Palma Symphony Orchestra, the Andrés Segovia Chamber Orchestra and the Reina Sofia Chamber Orchestra. She has collaborated with the Deutsche Kammerphilarmonie Bremen and performed in chamber music concerts with musicians such as Gérard Caussé, Harald Schoneweg, Marta Gulyàs and Claudio Martínez Mehner. He regularly plays piano-violin recitals together with his brother Claudio and is a member of the group Funktion, with which he dedicates himself to the world of contemporary music.
Since the age of 18 she has been a founding member of the Casals Quartet, with which she has played concerts in the most prestigious concert halls in Europe, the United States, Latin America and Japan. She currently teaches violin and chamber music at the Escuela Superior de Música de Catalunya and is invited to give masterclasses in Europe and the United States.
When she was little, Ximena used to say that when she grew up she wanted to be a "gift wrapper". And in the end what she does is very similar to this idea, because she designs artist's books, which are art objects that contain surprises, like wrapped gifts.
She has just returned from Mexico where she presented the exhibition Adsum at the Seminario de Cultura Mexicana. While we have a coffee she shows me some of her works, where she turns the traditional concept of book upside down, breaking away from the established, playing with the random. These are ingenious and unusual books, which often incorporate a ludic component, "because -she tells me- it is there where we all recognize ourselves."
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Ximena Pérez Grobet is a Mexican graphic artist and designer based in Barcelona. She has developed a professional work around the book as an artistic discipline and format of expression. Her experience in editorial design and production of art books has helped her to create a personal work through artist's books that she signs with her own publishing label Nowhereman Press.
Since 1994 she has exhibited in Mexico, Europe and the United States.
She also collaborates with artists who are interested in capturing their projects in artist's books, where the book as an object collects and interprets the artist's work in close dialogue with the author and gives it a unique value in limited editions.
SUSANA BOIX, executive producer.
"What I do is a kind of personal alchemy" Susana says to me, when I ask her about what her work is about. And she specifies: "It's about discovering other people' s talents and knowing how to combine these talents to make the final product work. "It would be like combining the ingredients of a recipe to cook a delicious dish". And here is where her creativity comes in, her criteria, her instinct to know how to choose a good team with such and such director because she knows that together they can give the best of each one. At the same time, she has to make sure that everything fits together financially.
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At the end of the 90s, Susana Boix learns the profession from international production companies such as RSA, ACNÉ or Wanda, and works for the world' s best advertising agencies, such as Wieden+Kennedy, Forsman&Bodenfors or Crispen Porter and Bogusky. At the beginning of 2017, understanding the change in the bases of communication, and after working for 25 years for the best Spanish advertising production companies, he founded Blank, a production company that recovers and defends audiovisual quality and that defines itself as "a blank space, a container of talent and resources to develop content, without distinction of format, or measure".His productions have received awards in practically all the world's advertising festivals, among which eight Cannes Lions, seven CLIO, and awards at OneShow or NY Art Directors Club stand out.
In Spain she has produced global campaigns for EAGames, Nike, Coca Cola or Adidas among others.
I have admired Joan Fontcuberta's work since I discovered his Sputnik project and, since then, the rest of his production, which always revolves around the idea that "all photography is a fiction that is presented as true". When we finish the portrait session he gives me a copy of Prosopagnosia, his latest book, which he has developed with Pilar Rosado, and explains to me, enthusiastic, what the project has consisted of: starting from an archive of photographs from a newspaper of the 30s, and through an artificial intelligence algorithm, they generated a collection of 853 human faces of people who have never existed. But what has most interested the authors are the errors that have occurred throughout the process. The faces that the system was creating, while learning to build them, from the pure noise of the pixels to the final forms, have given surprising results that recall the different artistic currents. It is what Fontcuberta calls "the very memory of art", from expressionism to minimalism, from surrealism to Bacon.
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Joan Fontcuberta (Barcelona, 1955) has developed a plural activity in the world of photography as a creator, teacher, essayist, exhibition curator and historian.
Author of a dozen history books and essays on photography such as El beso de Judas. Photography and Truth (1997), Ciencia y Fricción (1998), La cámara de Pandora (2010), La furia de las imágenes (2016) or Revelaciones (2019). Some thirty monographs have been published on his creative work.
His work has been exhibited in museums around the world such as MoMA in New York, Art Institute of Chicago, IVAM in València, FOAM in Amsterdam, MEP in Paris, Science Museum in London and has been acquired by numerous public collections.
Among others, in 2013 he received the Hasselblad International Award and in 2022 he has been distinguished with the title of Doctor Honoris Causa by the Université Paris VIII.
Isa is a survivor of the Barcelona underground, co-founder of the mythical Tebeos del Rrollo, and regular author of el Víbora.
We've known each other for years now, and she still has the same determined, optimistic and moderately transgressive personality she had when she was young.
We talk about the old days and the work we are doing now, I don't know about you, but I can't stop. I'm doing one project and I'm already thinking about the next one.
She shows me notebooks full of notes, sketches, and the project she is working on now: a drawn history of the people of Sant Climent de Llobregat.
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Isa Feu begins her artistic career as a cartoonist. In 1974 she publishes, together with Pàmies and Roger, De Quomic, el tebeo aristócrata. She is part of the group of Los tebeos del Rrollo (Picadura Selecta, Propaganda Moderna, El Sidecar, A la Calle...) and el Víbora. She has also published in the magazine Cavall Fort.
She has also collaborated as an illustrator in periodical publications (Diario de Barcelona, La Vanguardia Mujer, El Periódico, ROCK IN', Marie-Claire, Vitalidad, Barcelona Metropoli...) and has participated in exhibitions such as Perpetuum Mobile (1984) and Makoki 1977-1987 (Sala Metrònom and itinerant). In 1989, she exhibits her pictorial works at Piscolabis (Barcelona) and participates in two group exhibitions, Papel de Mujeres, at Sala Transformadors (Barcelona) and Sala Amadís (Madrid), and Zum-Zum at Galería Dubé (Barcelona). She also exhibits, in collaboration with Pep Casares, original mats at the DBarcelona Gallery, and participates in the fourth edition of Supermerc'art in Madrid. In 1990 she participates in Hipermerc'art at Sala Vinçon (Barcelona). From 1991 to 1996 she exhibits in Banyoles, Girona, Vilassar de Mar and Sant Joan Despí.
Since 1991 she works as an assistant decorator in the audiovisual world, especially in the cinematographic field.
In 2019 she collaborates in the magazine Lardín.