Ripolles

Biography

Ripollés, who is considered one of the most international stars of contemporary Spanish art, has exhibited his works throughout Europe, America and Asia for more than 50 years. Over the course of his brilliant career, he has acquired great prestige and recognition outside Spain for his audacity and the fantasy he creates with shapes, colours and materials

A painter, sculptor and unique etcher born in Castellón in 1932, Ripollés developed his creative side in France and Spain. Ripollés overcame a traumatic childhood before discovering art. When his mother died during labour, he was adopted by a family from a poor neighbourhood in Castellón and, in grey post-war Spain, had no choice but to work from a very young age.

Several years went by in poverty, until, still young enough to wear short trousers, Ripollés started working in an industrial painting workshop. It was there that he discovered the range of colours, their infinite combinations and the types of paintbrushes. That experience mesmerised Ripollés. At night he stayed awake, discovering a new language of shapes, curves and representations. In the solitude of a dark room, night after night he slowly became the artist, the genius. Once he had finished his day's work he attended drawing classes in the afternoons at the Ribalta Institute in Castellón; the classes nurtured Ripollés’ artistic interests.

The definitive emancipation, the breakaway from the scaffolding and overalls, took place when he joined the Drouand David gallery in Paris, one of the most prestigious in the world in 1958. First together with the Drouand gallery and later independently, he projected his recreation of vital and intense settings, rich in hues and emotions, all over Europe, in Germany, Belgium, Holland, Italy and France, before embracing other continents, such as America, with exhibitions in the USA and Mexico, and even Japan.

Ripollés is also someone who identifies with his native land and people. He is an artist with an inexhaustible imagination, who is sensitive to his surroundings and has a unique talent for reinterpreting his environment through painting, sculpture and etching. As one of the reference points of Spanish figurative expressionism, Ripollés has completed an extensive journey through different stylistic trends, before settling down, today, in a period marked by the vitalism of his scenes, evoking an active pulse and an emotional and expressive existence.

In his sculptural work, inspiration comes from man and nature. Totems, animal and human forms that could only exist in the imagination of a creator come to life in his collection, in a naive and carefree existence, far removed from dramatism. One of the distinguishing elements of Ripollés' sculptures is that practically all of his creations have a double frontal plane. They all have two faces, two expressions with which Ripollés represents the duality of man's emotional existence, condemned to live between suffering and jubilation. Using bronze, fibreglass, resin, marble and iron, Ripollés moulds in a symmetric relationship between the extreme sensitivity of the author for curves and forms and the hostile resistance of the material to his subtle domination and reflective mastering.

Over the years Ripollés has also continually redefined himself and has always been open to change. This rejuvenation has taken place in the form of calm transitions, which, today, clearly show the evolution of pictorial and sculptural work that evolves with each period, but which has one common and essential characteristic: it is all the work of a genius.