Joan Gardy Artigas - Africa

Color lithograph on sturdy paper, hand signed and numbered (HC) in pencil (see photo 5). Image size = paper size.

Joan Gardy Artigas (°1938) is the son of Josep Llorens Artigas, Picasso and Miró's favorite ceramist. He grew up surrounded by both the art and the artists who revolutionized twentieth-century art. As a teenager he became Miró's assistant and then studied for a period at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris. He befriended the sculptor Alberto Giacometti and opened a ceramics studio in Paris, where he worked with Georges Braques and Marc Chagall.
Back in Spain, he worked with Miró for twenty years on large murals and sculptures around the world, including ceramic murals for Harvard University, UNESCO (Paris), Foundation Maeght (St. Paul), the 1970 World Exhibition in Osaka, Barcelona Airport , the Kunsthaus in Zurich and IBM Headquarters (Barcelona). Artigas began exhibiting his own smaller ceramic and bronze sculptures in France in the mid-1960s and Spain, making lithographs and etchings in 1968. His lithographs often have powerful areas of color and are almost abstract with a humorous slant.
He has had exhibitions in many European, Japanese and American galleries and museums. A major retrospective of his works in all media was held at the Tecla Sala Center Cultural in Barcelona in 1996. Spaightwood Galleries gave him his first American one-man show in 1982.
He has been a visiting artist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He serves on the board of the Miró Foundation in Barcelona and is director of the Fundació Tallers Josep Llorens Artigas in Gallifa, Spain, which he founded in 1989 in memory of his father and to provide a place where artists from all parts of the world world to work together for a period of up to six months.