Antoni Clavé

Catalan painter, printmaker and stage designer. Trained in Barcelona, he left Spain at the end of the Civil War and settled in Paris in 1939, where he lived for the rest of his life.

He began in illustration and theatre — designing sets and costumes for ballet and film — and gradually pushed painting into the territory of matter: collage, cloth, crushed paper, metal, scraped surfaces. The kings, warriors and still lifes that run through his work always arrive half-effaced, as if surfacing from an old wall.