Joan Gardy Artigas is a Spanish artist working mainly in ceramics. His father, Josep Llorens Artigas, was an important ceramicist, and Artigas grew up surrounded by the artists who revolutionized twentieth-century art. He studied at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris, where he met Alberto Giacometti, who encouraged him to concentrate on sculpture.
Artigas began exhibiting his ceramic and bronze sculptures in France and Spain during the mid-1960s and began making lithographs and etchings in 1966.
Artigas and his father were close collaborators with Joan Miró and Pablo Picasso. Artigas worked with Miró for twenty years, including on one of Miró’s last large works, Dona i Ocell, which Artigas covered in mosaic tiles. Artigas also made the ceramics that Antoni Tàpies used for his mosaic in the Plaça de Catalunya in Sant Boi de Llobregat, for which Tàpies won the Gold Medal of Catalonia in 1982.
Artigas has had shows in many European, Japanese, and American galleries and museums, including The Meadows Museum of Spanish Art at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, the Hispanic Institute in New York, and Galerie Lelong in Paris. A major retrospective of his works in all media was held at the Tecla Sala Centre Cultural in Barcelona in 1996 and a large exhibition documenting Miró’s collaborations with Josep Llorens Artigas and Joan Gardy Artigas was held at the Fundació Pilar I Joan Miró in Palma de Mallorca in 1998. He had his first solo exhibition in America in 1982 at the Spaightwood Galleries. He has been a visiting artist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and the University of Nebraska.
Artigas’ monumental public sculptures can be found across the globe, including in Zurich, Barcelona, Dallas, London, Atlanta, Tokyo, and Miami.
