Collection: Joan Bennassar
Joan Bennàssar Vives (Pollença, 1950)
Joan Bennàssar was born in Pollença in 1950. From a very young age he showed artistic talent, so his family guided him towards painting and art. In his youth he entered the School of Arts and Crafts in Palma, where he had Jaume Mir as a teacher, who guided him towards sculpture. Bennàssar, despite having a strong pictorial heritage from the Pollensina School, was never attracted to landscape painting, so he wanted to break with his roots to create his own style.
In 1969 he entered the Higher School of Fine Arts of Sant Jordi, where he trained as a painter and sculptor. During those years, Barcelona was a city full of culture and art, where political movements attracted young people in the final years of the Franco regime, a time when Bennassar began to become active in the Workers' Party of Spain. Meanwhile, he continued his painting, when he discovered Antoni Tàpies – who was still a marginal artist – and this had a significant impact on him, causing Bennassar's work to evolve towards a more informalist phase, using materials such as sand, ropes and all kinds of textures.
His first solo exhibition was at Club Pollença in 1971. However, in the mid-1970s he abandoned painting to focus fully on politics, although finally, at the end of that decade, he returned to his pictorial production, never to abandon it again, thus entering one of the most prolific periods of his career, the 1980s. In this new stage, his work develops from numerous different themes that show his inner world and his imagination, creating a space between the big city and the small coastal town. Thus, we will find works that speak of the painter's studio, the human body, still lifes, or even an esoteric world. In 1983 he exhibited for the first time at ARCO, where he discovered the frivolous world of the art market. A year later he married for the second time and exhibited for the first time at the Maeght Gallery in Barcelona, a space with which he would have a relationship well into the 1990s. In the mid-1980s he achieved recognition as an artist, and increasingly focused on the development of the work rather than the result itself.
In the 1990s, as a mature artist and man, he returned to the imagery of his origins, of the village, of his roots, and began to develop paintings depicting pantries (Queviures). In this new stage, he also reflected on himself, with self-portraits. In the 2000s, he had a period in which he focused on eroticism, carrying out the project "Erotic Mallora" (2007) together with the writer Gabriel Janer Manila.
Throughout his artistic career, Bennassar has stood out for his thematic polarity. The female figure is a constant that he revisits again and again in painting and sculpture, representing her not only from a beautiful and sensual point of view, but also as the pinnacle of the matriarchal society of the Mallorca of his childhood.
Currently, Joan Bennàssar resides in Mallorca.