Joseph Cals - lithograph - 'Homage to Graham Sutherland' -1980 (Prent 190)

Joseph Cals (1949) was born in Stein, near Maastricht, in the south of the Netherlands, a region steeped in history. “As a child I visited an excavation of a prehistoric settlement near the old village center, where the earth was painstakingly scraped and examined. For a child in a time without television, this provided an inexhaustible reservoir to feed the imagination.” Another important experience from his youth was the AFS scholarship he won to study in the US. It was 67/68, a tumultuous year. The Vietnam War, race riots, the assassinations of both Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy. Paradoxically, at the same time there was a huge rise in the arts. All these impressions merged in his work.