Albert RÀfols-Casamada

Albert Ràfols-Casamada was born in Barcelona in 1923, the son of the painter Albert Ràfols i Cullerés and his wife Josefina Casamada i Oliver. He began his studies in architecture at the Universitat de Barcelona (1942-44) and drawing at the Tàrrega Art School in Barcelona (1945-48). As a member of the artists’group Els Vuit, which included such names as Jordi Sarsanedas, Miquel Gusils and Joan Comellas, he started to exhibit his work in Sala Pictòria in Barcelona in 1946, only a year later held his first solo exhibition here.

In 1950 Ràfols-Casamada received a scholarship to study in Paris, where he remained for the next four years with his wife-to-be, the Catalan painter Maria Girona, and other Catalan artists including Josep Guinovart, Antoni Tàpies and Xavier Valls.

In 1962 he took up a position as teacher and later became director of the Elisava School of Design in Barcelona. In 1967, together with his wife and other Catalan intellectuals, Albert Ràfols-Casamada founded the EINA School of Art and Design in Barcelona and remained director for the next 17 years.

In 1939 he began to write poetry in parallel and published these under the title Com una capsa in 1972. Further publications of his poetry followed with Signe d’aire in 1976 and Obra poética in 1978. He continued his literary career up until 2004 when his last volume Dimensions del present was published.

Albert Ràfols-Casamada died in 2009 in his native city of Barcelona.

Exhibitions of his work have taken place in many European countries as well as in the USA and South America. In 2001 his work was shown as a retrospective collection in the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art and in the Vanecian Institute of Modern Art. He was recipient of several honors including the Catalan National Award for the Visual Arts in 2003 and an award of the National Museum of Catalan Art in 2009.