Joan Gardy Artigas - Exposure

Color lithograph on sturdy paper.
Hand signed and numbered (64/80) in pencil.
Image size = paper size.

Joan Gardy Artigas (°1938) is the son of Josep Llorens Artigas, Picasso and Miró's favorite ceramicist. 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 Osaka World's Fair, Barcelona Airport, the Kunsthaus in Zurich, and IBM Headquarters (Barcelona). Artigas began exhibiting his own smaller ceramic and bronze sculptures in France and Spain in the mid-1960s and making lithographs and etchings in 1968. His lithographs often have bold fields 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 work in all media was held at the Tecla Sala Centre 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 is a member of the board of the Miró Foundation in Barcelona and is the 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 over the world can come to work together for periods of up to six months.