On the occasion of the 59th Venice Biennale the exhibition “The Spirit of the Warrior” will open at Palazzo Franchetti on April 22, 2022. Organized by ACP – Art Capital Partners, together with the Antoni Clavé Archives, the show – curated by Aude Hendgen, art historian and head of the Antoni Clavé Archives and Sitor Senghor, an independent curator – consists of about fifty works; sculptures, assemblages of textiles and paintings, including large formats, that explore the theme of the Warrior, one of the artist’s most important recurring subjects.
Born in Barcelona in 1913, Clavé was first confronted by war in 1937. The theme of the warrior is found very early on in his art and is among the subjects that ensured him public recognition in Paris by 1958. Antoni Clavé returns to Venice, a city that already saw the reaffirmation and consecration of his international success in 1984 with the dedication of the entire Spanish pavilion to his work.
Francesc Català Roca “Antoni Clavé in his studio rue de Chatillon, Paris 1964”
In contact with the sculptures and African masks that he surrounded himself with in his ateliers, the figure of the warrior remained fundamental to Clavé’s work and haunted him his whole life. It was the artist’s favorite title and subject, and is an obsessive recurring image in Clavé’s sculptures, paintings, textile and wood assemblages through to the early 2000s.
It is through the prism of the memory of African masks that this exhibition takes a new look at the art of Antoni Clavé. Homage, admiration, appropriation, his connection to the arts of Africa is multiple. Clavé takes up his artistic weaponry to assert his pictorial identity, which is one of absolute modernity, timeless and universal. The exhibition will then be hosted from 23 March to 27 May 2023 at the Donwahi Foundation in Abidjan.
Exhibition to be discovered from April 22 to October 23, 2022 at the Palazzo Franchetti.