20^th Century Spanish

A self-taught artist, Claramunt was born into a middle-class family which was passionate about culture, thus guaranteeing the future artist a liberal and secular education.

He left home to devote himself fulltime to painting and moved to Barcelona where he settled in the area of Plaza Real, following a bohemian lifestyle and taking up with gypsy families, assimilating many of their customs, like their love for bullfighting, cockfights, and street markets, what he himself referred to as the wild side of the city.

In the three decades he was active as a painter he cultivated subject matters and styles that would gradually change as he became physically and socially more distant from Barcelona.

His early stage as an artist is dated from 1967 to 1984, with a painting cutting against the dominant stream of the time. Rather than looking for references in the avant-gardes, he decided to focus on naturalistic painting and, more particularly, in the art of the Catalan painter Isidre Nonell. In those days, Claramunt set the foundations of his personality while earning a name in art circles in Barcelona.

He also began to have his first solo exhibitions, including one held in 1983 in the no longer existing Galería , his first survey show that revisited fifteen years of his practice and somehow put an end to his Barcelona period.

Suffocated by the stagnant art scene he perceived in Barcelona at the time, in 1984 he moved to Madrid and from there to Seville, from where he would travel often to Morocco. He eventually resettled in Madrid where he lived till the end of his life. All that travelling from his period of maturity helped him to develop a more analytical and synthetic painting that showcases his mastery of all the recourses and influences he absorbed.

Luis Claramunt died in Zarautz on 18^th December 2000. Though he was not even forty, he left behind a significant oeuvre which is periodically shown in major galleries, including Juana de Aizpuru, his main dealer since the late 1980s.