Marsans, Luis

BIOGRAPHY OF LUIS MARSANS :
He was born in Barcelona on December 31, 1930. In 1936, during the Spanish Civil War, Marsans moved to Paris with his family and did not return to Barcelona until 1940.

In 1947 he traveled to the United States and Mexico. In New York, thanks to Ismael Smith, with whom he maintained a great friendship, he met Salvador Dalí and discovered contemporary art.

A year later, Marsans returned to Barcelona and decided to devote himself fully to painting. He began his pictorial training in the studio of Ramón Rogent. Intuition, rather than direct knowledge of contemporary art, helped him to discover the Bauhaus and Malevich. His interest in these works led him to try to meet Walter Gropius in Aix-en-Provence during the summer of 1949. Chance intervened that, before meeting Gropius, he visited a major exhibition of Cézanne, which would determine a change in his artistic orientation.

Marsans reaffirmed the aesthetic option taught by Ramón Rogent: the taste for a clear and precise type of painting. In the early 1950s, he left Rogent's studio and continued his technical and aesthetic research on his own.

Between 1955 and 1960, he met Marcel Duchamp in Cadaqués, who seduced him intellectually, and from that moment he began to adopt a new plastic language.

From 1966, Marsans began to address a specific literary theme: the recreation of Marcel Proust's world. At the same time, he also worked on the human figure and began to draw flowers.

In 1972 he presented his work to the public for the first time at the Tretze Gallery in Barcelona.

His interest in editing a portfolio of Proust's etchings brought him into contact with the Jacob Gallery in Paris, which organized an exhibition for him in 1980. From that year on, he exhibited regularly in Paris and his figurative language took on new themes, such as music, still lifes and books.

In 1982 he exhibited Proust's illustrations at the Balzac Museum in Paris. In 1985, Luis Marsans participated in an exhibition at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington and in 1986 in New York.

In 1995, the Palacio de la Virreina of the Barcelona City Council presented the solo exhibition Del Concepto a la Representación, which was complemented by other exhibitions at the Fundación Caja Rioja in Logroño, the Palacio Almudí in Murcia and the Casal Solleric in Palma de Mallorca.