Sans titre, 1999

Manel Lledós  

Manel Lledós, born in Barcelona, Catalonia (Spain) in 1955. From an early age, he enrolled in the Llotja art school and worked under the direction of the artist Victor Esteban Ripaux, a classical painter trained in the 'School of Fine Arts in Paris. In 1971, Lledós joined the Escola de Belles Arts de San Jordi in Barcelona. He spent months traveling in Spain, Italy and France, absorbing the art of the past as well as contemporary currents.

At the end of the 1970s, his work began to evolve between an abstraction of a gestural field and a serial geometry. In 1981, Lledós moved to New York to start over. His decision is motivated by his need to experience a larger cultural context.

In the early 1980s, he moved to a studio first in the Lower East Side, then in Brooklyn, and exhibited with the Joan Prats gallery as well as others across the Americas and Europe.

In 1994, Lledós was hired as a professor of painting by the Department of Art at Kingsborough Community College (CUNY). Lledós still resides in Brooklyn and his studio is now in Dumbo. For Lledós, painting is a rapprochement between the tangible and the abstract, the permanent and the transformative, the certain and the unexpected. His painting slowly evolves towards an organic geometry which reflects on place, time and belonging.