Francisco Farreras Ricart

FRANCISCO FARRERAS RICART (Barcelona, 1927).
Untitled.
Silkscreen on paper. Final art / colour proof. Published by the Ibero-Swiss printing house.
Presents dry stamp of the Ibero-Swiss printing house.
It has a fold in the left corner.
Measurements: 69 x 49.5 cm.
In Spain, the Ibero-Swiss company hosted the main Spanish artists from the mid-1960s to the 1990s. The serigrapher José Llopis made this firm an indisputable reference in terms of artistic printing. From artists linked to pop art, optical art and geometric art to Zóbel and Tàpies, as well as artists with a clear political commitment such as Renau, Genovés, Equipo Crónica and Equipo Realidad, they all found Ibero-Suiza's silkscreen printing to be an ideal technique for their projects: they liked its industrial character, its procedures, the effects and nuances obtained, and the affinity of all this with the resources of the media.
Francisco Farreras began his artistic activity at an early age under the guidance of the painter Antonio Gómez Cano and Mariano de Cossío, at the School of Arts and Crafts in Santa Cruz de Tenerife. In 1943 he settled in Madrid as a disciple of Vázquez Díaz, and studied Fine Arts at the San Fernando School in Madrid, obtaining the title of Professor of Drawing in 1949. In 1951 he was selected for the I Bienal Hispanoamericana, and two years later he travelled to Paris, where he came into contact with geometric abstraction. Between 1952 and 1954 he made several study trips to Paris, Belgium and Holland. It was in 1954 that he began his professional artistic career, taking part in many group exhibitions and beginning to hold personal exhibitions both in Spain and abroad. In 1966 he moved back to Madrid, after living in the United States for several years. During these years he was selected by the Modern Art Museum and the Guggenheim Museum in New York, as well as by the Tate Gallery in London, to be included in their exhibitions of Spanish painting. In 1982 he commissioned a large collage mural for Madrid airport. His retrospective exhibitions include the one at the Centro Cultural de la Villa in Madrid (1999), and his work has been shown at the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid, the Tate Gallery in London, the Carnegie Institute in Los Angeles, the Haags Museum in The Hague, the Hamilton in Toronto, the McNay in San Antonio, Texas, the Moderne in Stockholm, the National Museums of Modern Art in Paris, Helsinki, Madrid, Seville and Tokyo, the Guggenheim in New York and the Museo de Bellas Artes in Bilbao, among many others.