Ferran Garcia Sevilla moved to Barcelona in 1969 to study History of Art and Modern and Contemporary History and has lived there ever since. His beginnings in the 1970s are situated in the sphere of conceptualism, questioning the function of art, the artist and consumption from a range of disciplines such as video and photography. He was one of the main exponents of the consecration of painting in Europe in the early 1980s, a decade in which he received international acclaim and exhibited not only in Spain, but also in France, the United Kingdom and Japan. His works from these years were influenced by Albert Ràfols-Casamada, Antoni Tàpies and, above all, Joan Miró. The use of drips and rapid brushwork are a reference to the characteristic primitivism of this pictorial genre, combined towards the end of the decade with his ironic phrases and the inclusion of such everyday objects as books and shoes, highlighting the free association of sign and image. He broadened the content of his images in the early 1990s with parts of the human body (hands, feet and so on) and gradually became increasingly introspective, with intersections and overlaps of elements such as drip and line. In 1998 García Sevilla gave up exhibiting, though he continued to paint, until 2007 when he exhibited in the Galeria Joan Prats in Barcelona.
He took part in the 1986 Venice Biennial as well as in the 1987 Documenta in Kassel, and the following institutions stand out among the Spanish and international museums in which he has exhibited: the Fondation Cartier in Paris (1997), the IVAM in Valencia (1998), the Malmö Konsthall, Sweden (1998), the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid (2001) and the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin (2010). Public and private collections that own his work include the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, Fundació ”la Caixa” in Barcelona, Fundaçao Serralves in Oporto and the Centre Pompidou in Paris, among others.
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