20th-21st Century Spanish

Arcadi Blasco was a multifaceted artist whose practice fused pottery, sculpture and painting in a highly personal and unique output on the boundaries between sculpture and ceramics.

Born into a family of craftsmen, from a very early age he engaged with the world of art through music and drawing. After a brief period in the seminary, he decided to move to Madrid in 1947 where he attended classes at Círculo de Bellas Artes and enrolled at the San Fernando School of Fine Arts, though he was ultimately to graduate from the San Carlos School of Fine Arts of Valencia in 1953. During his time in Rome, thanks to a scholarship at the Spanish Academy, he soaked up all he could of both ancient and modern art and mastered many different techniques including ceramics, enamelling, mosaic and stained-glass, which would become part of his process of creation ever since. On returning to Spain his engagement with ceramics was further cemented when he was commissioned by the Caja de Ahorros de Madrid savings bank to document the surviving potteries in the region of southern Castile.

In the late fifties ceramics began to gain more and more ground in his practice, displacing painting and drawing. This is particularly evident in his ceramic pictures which, alongside his stain-glass windows, spirals, and series of "idea objects", "ornamental proposals", "tortures" and "architectures to protect from fear", became his main vehicle for expression throughout the sixties and seventies.

After his suites of "ruins", "wheels", "homages", "new architectures" and "new walls", towards the end of his life he began to engage with installation in the series "folds", moving away from clay, his talisman material, and replacing it with recycled wood.