Moisès Villèlia | Colección

20th century Spanish

Moisès Villèlia is one of the most singular figures in Spanish modernity and the creator of a distinctive sculptural language. Born in Barcelona in 1928, from 1942 onwards he learned his craft in the family workshop in Mataró, where his father, Julián Villèlia, taught him traditional carving techniques. Craft and poetry, which he read passionately in his youth, would have a decisive influence on his future work.

Despite his figurative beginnings, Villèlia soon leaned more towards the Catalan avant-garde. In 1954 he held his first solo exhibition at the Municipal Museum of Mataró and co-founded Arte Actual, a group that broke with academic canons. Two years later, his participation in the 9th Salón de Octubre with the only abstract work on show placed him at the centre of artistic debate. Shortly afterwards, Joan Prats introduced him to Club 49, an association which was instrumental in promoting modernity in Barcelona, and in 1957 he presented his first bamboo cane sculpture.

The discovery of bamboo as a working material marked a before-and-after in his artistic practice. He used it to forge an unprecedented sculptural language based on lightness, transparency and organic tension. Composed of canes, knots and voids, his structures rise and float in space, eschewing conventional monumentality. Villèlia conceives sculpture as an open composition, in which space is not so much a backdrop as an active material, and in which nature and culture come together in balance.

During the 1960s he experimented with fibre cement, metals and polyester, designed children’s toys and created stage sets for the theatre. In 1967 he travelled to Paris thanks to a grant from the Institut Français and soon afterwards he moved to Latin America, where contact with Indigenous cultures broadened his creative horizon and led him to incorporate large bamboo canes. On returning to Spain in 1972, he settled in the Pyrenees in the province of Girona and continued to work on his personal synthesis of tradition and modernity. In the 1980s he introduced ceramics into his sculptures, once again reaffirming his interest in the fusion of materials. He died in Barcelona on 28 September 1994.

Widely admired by artists and poets such as Miró, Jacques Dupin and Joan Brossa, Villèlia’s work introduced a way of thinking about sculpture that transcends form, grounded in freedom and poetry, and unquestionably stands as one of the most original contributions of the twentieth century.