Ero, 1982

Josep Guinovart   Emerging artists

Ero is a 1982 lithograph coloured by hand by Josep Guinovart, issued in an edition of 75 copies in a horizontal format of 76 x 56 cm. The sheet is dominated by a broad band of intense reds and vermilions laid across a ground of pale ochre and orange washes, like a burning landscape or a field of earth under a summer sun. Over and within this band, Guinovart scatters black blots, red ovals capped with black, scribbled tangles and long, wiry lines that run across the composition with a lively, almost seismographic energy, while splashes and drips enliven the margins. The combination of fluid lithographic washes, gestural marks and touches of hand-applied colour gives the image the immediacy of a painting and the material density characteristic of the artist. The title, a short and enigmatic word, leaves the reading open. Josep Guinovart (Barcelona, 1927–2007) was one of the major Catalan artists of the second half of the twentieth century, linked to Informalism, whose abstraction is nourished by the land, the agricultural world and the light of rural Catalonia, and who founded the Espai Guinovart in Agramunt. The impression is hand-signed in pencil at lower right and numbered at lower left.