ArtistSpanish
Joan Josep Tharrats
6 active items
Joan Josep Tharrats i Vidal was born on 5 March 1918 in Girona, into an industrialist family - his father was the businessman and poet Josep Tharrats i Vila. This dual inheritance of practical enterprise and literary sensibility would shape a career that ranged far beyond painting. From 1932 to 1935 the family lived in Beziers, France, before settling in Barcelona, where Tharrats began studies at the Escola Massana. The Spanish Civil War cut his education short, and he did not return seriously to art until 1942.
His early work drew on Impressionism, but he moved steadily toward abstraction, finding particular direction in the formal structures of Piet Mondrian and the spiritual dimensions of Wassily Kandinsky. By 1946 he had introduced collage into his practice, building surfaces that combined material and image in ways unusual for Catalan art of the period. The decisive turn came in 1947, when a gathering at the Institut Francais in Barcelona brought him into contact with Joan Ponc, Modest Cuixart, Antoni Tapies, Joan Brossa and Josep Vicenc Foix. Together several of them founded Dau al Set - Catalan for "the seventh face of the die" - an avant-garde group that published a magazine printed in Tharrats's own atelier. The group became the central node of Spanish experimental art in the late 1940s and 1950s, positioning Barcelona alongside Paris and New York in debates about abstraction and Surrealism.
Tharrats developed a technique he called maculatures, beginning with the sheets that became stuck between the rollers of the printing press and were overprinted by successive pulls. These accidental accumulations of ink became the starting point for deliberate compositions - a method that placed chance and craft in constant dialogue. The process connected him intellectually to Art Informel and Tachisme, the European movements that foregrounded gesture and material over representation. He exhibited at the 5th Sao Paulo Biennale in 1959 and at the Venice Biennale in 1960 and again in 1964, bringing his work to an international audience at a moment when informal abstraction was at its height. From 1954 he was a regular presence at the Sala Gaspar in Barcelona, and his work travelled to Stockholm and New York City from 1955 onward.
Beyond painting and printmaking, Tharrats worked across an unusually wide range of forms: posters, book illustrations, murals, stained glass, mosaics, jewellery, and opera scenographies. In 1966 he founded the Associacio d'Artistes Actuals. He was also an art theorist and publisher, contributing substantially to the critical literature on Catalan modernism. In 1983 he received the Cross of Sant Jordi, Catalonia's highest civic honor, and in 1994 he was awarded the National Prize for Plastic Arts and admitted to the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of Sant Jordi. A major traveling exhibition, "Les maculatures de Tharrats," was organized by the Cultural Department of the Diputacio de Barcelona in 2009, eight years after his death on 4 July 2001 in Barcelona.
At auction, Tharrats appears primarily through Spanish houses, with the Nordic market represented mainly by Balclis and Arce Auctions. Among the 22 items recorded on Auctionist, works span paintings, drawings, and mixed media on paper, with the highest recorded Nordic sale reaching 17,121 SEK for a large handwoven tapestry. His prints and mixed media works on paper form the core of what circulates at auction, offering collectors an accessible entry point into the output of one of the twentieth century's most technically inventive Catalan artists.