The Altana cultural foundation is, thanks to the support of AC/E (Spanish Cultural Action), staging the exhibition Los colores de la tierra (Colours of the Earth) at the "Sinclair" house in Bad Homburg, Germany, featuring 90 paintings and drawings by the Catalan painter Joan Hernández Pijuan. The Barcelona-born artist (1931-2005) is one of Spain's most important contemporary painters.
The central focus of Hernández Pijuan's output is the landscape of Catalonia: the dusty, earthy colours of its sunbaked countryside, its hazy outline, symbols of an ancestral tradition of intensive agriculture. With just a few lines, spaces and colours the artist reconstructs the memory etched by his first impressions. Hernández Pijuan created his own highly distinctive pictorial world, its expressivity based on strictly abiding by the imperative of simplicity. In order to achieve such "directness", the artist plunged himself into meditation governed by the principle of reduction. "I always attempt to paint as if I knew absolutely nothing about painting, as if it was my first canvas," explained the painter regarding his creative process. His palette is made up predominantly of the colours of nature: earthy ochres, lush greens, radiant yellows, reddish browns and blacks. His works have an unmistakable character and glow with superlative expressivity. Throughout his life Hernández Pijuan was at pains to avoid being bound by any artistic doctrine. Although his paintings reveal a great degree of abstraction, he always refused to be labelled as an abstract painter: "I base everything on reality".
Since 2003, the Altana foundation's art collection includes works by Joan Hernández Pijuan. In partnership with the artist's heirs, Altana presents 90 paintings and drawings illustrating all his creative periods.