Lives and works in Mallorca. Joan Cortés trained as an artist at the Escola d’Arts i Oficis in Palma, Mallorca, and La Llotja in Barcelona. Early on he showed an interest in art, determined by the environment he grew up in: his highly sensitive family was devoted to craft for several generations, and indeed one of his ancestors had been an artist before him. His career began in the ‘eighties when he took part in different exhibitions, but it was not until the late 1990s that he consolidated his position as a sculptor. Joan Cortés is a creator with a highly personal language characterised by sobriety and the predominance of essential, organic – vegetable and mineral – shapes, who achieves a refinement of the treatment of volumes in his work. By using different industrial materials such as plastic, wood, steel, polyurethane, rubber and plaster coated in lacquer, paint or simply without coating, he makes his works seem almost ethereal. The colour white is present in many of his works and becomes a symbol that proves that nothing is superfluous in his creation. Of the individual exhibitions he has given, we should highlight those of the Galeria Maior, Pollença-Palma (from 1995 on), Galería Van der Voort, Ibiza (2003, 2006), Horno de la Ciudadela, Pamplona (2006), Galeria Joan Melià, Alcúdia, Mallorca (2008), Es Baluard Museu d’Art Modern i Contemporani de Palma (2009), and Galería Ana Vilaseco, Santiago de Compostela (2011). He has taken part in collective exhibitions such as Art Report- Diario de Mallorca, Casal Solleric, Palma (2003), Nit Niu, Cala Sant Vicenç, Pollença, Mallorca (2003) and for several different years in international fairs like ARCO, Madrid, Art Cologne, and Artissima, Turin. His work is present in public and private collections such as those of the Ajuntament de Palma, Ayuntamiento de Pamplona, Col·lecció Testimoni “la Caixa”, Patio Herreriano Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Español, Valladolid, Govern de les Illes Balears, Colección de la Fundación Coca-Cola and Fundació “Sa Nostra”, Palma, among others. E.B.