Antoni Clavé is one of the leading figures of 20th-century Catalan and Spanish art. Born in Barcelona in 1913, his artistic career began in the early 1930’s with his designing movie posters in the same city. July 1936 saw the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War and by 1937, Antoni Clavé found himself mobilised. Following the fall of Barcelona and Franco’s victory, Clavé was forced into exile. Like his elder Pablo Picasso, whom he met in Paris during the Second World War and who would become one of his most loyal friends, Clavé made his career in France, without ever breaking his ties with Barcelona, nor, of course, turning his back on an international career.
Spanning his early work for the cinemas on the Rambla de Canaletes to his monumental canvases for Barcelona’s Ajuntament (city hall), all via Paris, where he was one of the leading figures in the artistic renewal of the 1960s, and Japan and New York, places which influenced him to the point of renewing his art in the 1980s and 1990s, this exclusive exhibition includes exceptional public and private loans, enabling visitors to rediscover the multi-faceted art of Antoni Clavé.
The “Clavé amb Majúscules” exhibition is shown in two venues: a paintings retrospective at the Palau Martorell, complemented at the Reial Cercle Artistic by an exhibition that invites visitors to approach Antoni Clavé’s art in all its materiality. Original assemblages, bronze sculptures, matrices and engravings reveal the hidden poetry of the materials and provide an insight into Antoni Clavé’s creative alchemy.
The “Clavé amb Majúscules” exhibition runs from September 5 to November 16, 2025 at the Palau Martorell and the Reial Cercle Artistic in Barcelona.
