Joan Gardy Artigas - Commencement

Color lithograph 1980s on sturdy paper, hand signed and numbered: 50/80.
Image size = paper size.

JOAN GARDY ARTIGAS (°1938) is the son of Josep Llorens Artigas, Picasso and Miró's favorite ceramicist. Artigas grew up surrounded by both the art and the artists who revolutionized twentieth-century art. As a teenager he became Miró's assistant and left Spain a few years later to escape the oppressive Franco regime and try to establish an independent artistic identity. After a period as a student at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris, he befriended the sculptor Alberto Giacometti and opened a ceramics studio in Paris, where he collaborated with Georges Braques and Marc Chagall.
When his father became too weak to work, Miró called him back to Spain and a twenty-year partnership ensued. The fruits of this collaboration can be seen in large ceramic murals and sculptures all over the world, including ceramic murals for Harvard University, UNESCO (Paris), Foundation Maeght (St. Paul), the 1970 World Exhibition in Osaka, Barcelona Airport, the Kunsthaus in Zurich, the Haack Museum (Ludwigshafen), IBM Headquarters (Barcelona) and a 60-metre ceramic mural for the Palais des Expositions et des Congres de Madrid. He and Miró also collaborated on a 22-metre ceramic sculpture for a fountain in Barcelona.
Artigas began exhibiting his own smaller ceramic and bronze sculptures in France and Spain in the mid-1960s and began making lithographs and etchings in 1968. He has had a number of commissions for large public sculptures (in bronze, ceramic and concrete) in Europe, Japan and the US and has had shows in many European, Japanese and American galleries and museums. A major retrospective of his works 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 Miro 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.