KunstenaarSpanishgeb.1938
Miguel Torner De Semir
17 actieve items
Miquel Torner de Semir was born in 1938 inside the medieval castle of Santa Pau, a fortified village in the volcanic landscape of La Garrotxa, Girona. He is said to be the last person born within that stone enclosure, a fact that shaped how he understood history: not as something passed, but as a physical space one inhabits. The Roman Pyrenees, Romanesque chapels, and the dense Gothic architecture of Catalonia became his visual grammar long before he ever attended a formal art school.
He trained at the Royal Catalan Academy of Fine Arts and later at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Madrid. The formative influence on his technical discipline came from the muralist and engraver Ricard Marlet, who taught him to think through drawing first. Marlet introduced him to Catalan Modernisme and the Noucentisme movement, and from these Torner de Semir derived a sense of outline as structural, not merely decorative. The thick black contours that define his figures carry the weight of stained glass leading.
His first solo exhibition was held in Terrassa in 1968. Over the following decades he showed across Spain and in major European cities: Paris, Brussels, Frankfurt, Heidelberg, Strasbourg, Saint-Paul-de-Vence, Dijon, and Clermont-Ferrand, among others. The consistent subject across this body of work is the human figure, most often women, placed in interiors or against spare backgrounds, rendered with that distinctive medieval outline but dissolved into abstracted planes of colour and mixed media texture. His works sit between two eras without fully belonging to either.
Public recognition followed through institutional channels. His work entered the collection of the Museum of the Royal Mint in Spain, and in 2003 the Spanish government commissioned him to design a commemorative postage stamp marking the 25th anniversary of the Spanish Constitution. The commission placed him within a line of artists asked to translate civic history into a single, compressed image.
On the Nordic auction market, all 28 known lots have passed through Balclis, the Barcelona auction house, reflecting his primary collector base in Catalonia and Spain. Categories are split between paintings (19 lots) and works on paper (9 lots), confirming the centrality of drawing to his practice. The top recorded results on Auctionist reached approximately 2,100 SEK, with the leading subjects including landscapes and female figures. Activity remains steady, with 9 lots currently active, suggesting continued collector interest in his figurative output.