Nadal Carlos

Carlos Nadal was born in Paris in 1917. Within four years, his family moved to Barcelona.

Nadal’s father owned a commercial design workshop. There he began to work as an apprentice and learned to paint in his early teens. He took art classes at a school on Barcelona’s Calle Caspe. In 1935 Nadal won three awards, including an award from the Watercolors Association of Barcelona, ​​the Mural Composition Count Lavern and the Masriera prize. A year later, Nadal received a scholarship from the Barcelona City Council and because of which he was able to attend the Escola Superior de Belles Arts de Sant Jordi.

Nadal exhibited for the first time in a collective exhibition at the Galeries Dalmau in 1941, and he had his first solo exhibition at La Pinacoteca in Barcelona in 1944. In 1946 the Barcelona City Council again granted him a scholarship to continue his education in Paris at École des Beaux-Arts. In the French capital, he took part in the Autumn Salons.

In 1948 Nadal married the Belgian sculptor Flore Joris and moved to live in Belgium. Here, he stated that he discovered the effects of light on painting and the use of color that would already be a distinctive sign of his work. The influence of Fauvism on Nadal’s paintings was remarkably clear. There was continuous success for the artist in Belgium and he remained very active, exhibiting there as well as in France, Spain, Amsterdam and the United States. His subjects were varied and included beaches, urban landscapes, natural landscapes, seascapes and more.

In 1954 Nadal exhibited with great success at Kunstverein Düsseldorf and at the Royal Academy in London, and won the painting prize at the International SPA Contest. During the same year, he met Pablo Picasso on the Côte d'Azur and began a great friendship with the artist. Nadal’s work can be found in the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art, the Royal Museum of Brussels and more.

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(Biography provided by Galeria Luis Carvajal)

In the revolutionary wake of Impressionism, artists like Vincent van Gogh, Georges Seurat, Paul Cézanne and Paul Gauguin advanced the style further while firmly rejecting its limitations. Although the artists now associated with Postimpressionist art did not work as part of a group, they collectively employed an approach to expressing moments in time that was even more abstract than that of the Impressionists, and they shared an interest in moving away from naturalistic depictions to more subjective uses of vivid colors and light in their paintings.

The eighth and final Impressionist exhibition was held in Paris in 1886, and Postimpressionism — also spelled Post-Impressionism — is usually dated between then and 1905. The term “Postimpressionism” was coined by British curator and art critic Roger Fry in 1910 at the “Manet and the Postimpressionists” exhibition in London that connected their practices to the pioneering modernist art of Édouard Manet. Many Postimpressionist artists — most of whom lived in France — utilized thickly applied, vibrant pigments that emphasized the brushstrokes on the canvas.

The Postimpressionist movement’s iconic works of art include van Gogh’s The Starry Night (1889) and Seurat’s A Sunday on La Grande Jatte (1884). Seurat’s approach reflected the experimental spirit of Postimpressionism, as he used Pointillist dots of color that were mixed by the eye of the viewer rather than the hand of the artist. Van Gogh, meanwhile, often based his paintings on observation, yet instilled them with an emotional and personal perspective in which colors and forms did not mirror reality. Alongside Mary Cassatt, Cézanne, Henri Matisse and Gauguin, the Dutch painter was a pupil of Camille Pissarro, the groundbreaking Impressionist artist who boldly organized the first independent painting exhibitions in late-19th-century Paris.

The boundary-expanding work of the Postimpressionist painters, which focused on real-life subject matter and featured a prioritization of geometric forms, would inspire the Nabis, German Expressionism, Cubism and other modern art movements to continue to explore abstraction and challenge expectations for art.

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Figurative art, as opposed to abstract art, retains features from the observable world in its representational depictions of subject matter. Most commonly, figurative paintings reference and explore the human body, but they can also include landscapes, architecture, plants and animals — all portrayed with realism.

While the oldest figurative art dates back tens of thousands of years to cave wall paintings, figurative works made from observation became especially prominent in the early Renaissance. Artists like Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and other Renaissance masters created naturalistic representations of their subjects.

Pablo Picasso is lauded for laying the foundation for modern figurative art in the 1920s. Although abstracted, this work held a strong connection to representing people and other subjects. Other famous figurative artists include Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud. Figurative art in the 20th century would span such diverse genres as Expressionism, Pop art and Surrealism.

Today, a number of figural artists — such as Sedrick Huckaby, Daisy Patton and Eileen Cooper — are making art that uses the human body as its subject.

Because figurative art represents subjects from the real world, natural colors are common in these paintings. A piece of figurative art can be an exciting starting point for setting a tone and creating a color palette in a room.

Browse an extensive collection of figurative paintings on 1stDibs.