Ibiza’s Museum of Contemporary Art (MACE) presents ‘Miquel Barceló, El present permanent’, an exhibition commissioned by Enrique Juncosa, which brings together thirteen of the artist’s most recent paintings, done between 2024 and 2025, as well as nine pieces of pottery created between 2018 and 2024.
The exhibition will open on 21st June at 8pm and will run until 16th November 2025.
This is the third time that Miquel Barceló has exhibited his work at Ibiza’s Museum of Contemporary Art. His previous shows were: ‘Miquel Barceló in the Balearic Islands’ (May–August 2003), organised by the Govern Balear, and ‘Miquel Barceló–Barry Flanagan/Ceramics and Drawings (April–October 2012), organised by the MACE on the occasion of the museum’s reopening after the renovation and expansion of its premises.
Miquel Barceló (Felanitx, Majorca, 1957) continually explores all types of formats and materials. His work ranges from painting, sculpture, drawings on paper and ceramics, to installations and performance art. Miquel Barceló lives between Majorca and Paris. Highpoints of his prestigious career include an exhibition at documenta 7 in Kassel (Germany) in 1982, and one at the Venice Biennale in 2009, housed in the Spanish Pavilion. Moreover, his work is showcased in some of the world’s most renowned institutions of art and museums, such as the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid, the Rufino Tamayo Museum in Mexico and the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, among others.
From within his studios in Majorca and Paris, and inside his workshops, Barceló’s work draws inspiration from his travels as well as from the land and sea of his native island, home to ancient cultures and enduring traditions. On this occasion, his paintings harken back to the cave paintings of Lascaux, Altamira and Chauvet, all of which the artist has visited. His latest works allow us to ponder and feel the ancient sense of magic that gave rise to cave painting, an effect he achieves by working his canvases with textures and volumes in an attempt to imitate the rocky surfaces of the caves and the way in which their natural colours and topographies became integrated into pictorial expression. The palette he employs for these works is austere, dominated by whites, blacks and ochres, which nonetheless emit rich and primary sensory values. Thus, the paintings of mammal heads (caprids, bovids and others), make us feel the immediacy of the rugged reliefs on which those prehistoric ritual paintings were depicted. The paintings at Chauvet, considered to be the oldest in the world, date back to roughly 35,000 and 22,000 years before Christ. Contemplating them, we may perhaps be surprised to recognise an anthropological “primitiveness” in ourselves as we stand transfixed by such totemic, sacred animals: the mammoth, the bison, the camel and the bull, all symbols of the earth’s telluric power, all manifestations of the creative forces and primitive gods that oversaw our Mediterranean culture.
His pottery features a range of fish and flowers: on one piece a gracefully tentacled octopus appears to be gliding off the plate that contains it… These are pieces that celebrate life, inspired by the artist’s direct experience of the world around him, a world with which he is in intimate communion. Moreover, although chromatically austere, these works allow the presence of aquatic blues as well as the natural colours of the clay from which they are crafted, shades of grey and white that accompany the rhythm of the form itself, expansive and gestural. Indeed, Barceló describes his pottery as ‘a way of painting’. All of these works reconnect us with the primordial origins of the earliest pottery when, during the Neolithic revolution, human beings were faced with the necessity of storing grain or fruits and sought to mould the first simple bowl out of a lump of clay.
