Name Maties Ferre | ||
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Maties Palau Ferré (1921–2000) was a painter from Montblanc, Catalonia, Spain. He made cubist oil paintings, India ink drawings, as well as ceramics and a few sculptures.
He is renowned as the painter who burned his canvases.
Life and works
He studied art in the Reial Acadèmia Catalana de Belles Arts de Sant Jordi, Barcelona. He moved to Paris in 1957. There he became a disciple of Pablo Picasso.
He exposed his artwork in many countries, including Spain, France, the United Kingdom and the United States. His most important works are titled Dona i lluna (woman and moon), Montblanc and Guer-Blanc. He signed his works Palau Ferré.
Palau Ferré was known for his sudden swings of humor and became notorious in 1974 for burning his oil paintings as a protest against the unfavorable resolution of a legal conflict he had with an art dealer. Clamoring against the "prostitution of art", he kept burning all of his paintings he was able to lay his hands on during a period of about twenty years. He used to release the ashes in the Francolí River, but some of the ashes of his oil paintings were kept and displayed in an art exhibition in Pennsylvania, US. Following his protest he stopped painting oils and didn't didn't allow that any of his works in private hands be exhibited until 1989. His last period includes only works made with ink on thick paper, following a technique of his own invention.
After his death on 1 January 2000 in Montblanc, the town hall of his birthplace honored him and named a street after him. The Palau Ferré Art Museum was inaugurated the following year displaying some of the few canvases that survived the destruction inflicted by their author.