Joan Hernández Pijuan
He was born in Barcelona in 1931. He studied at the Llotja School, the Barcelona School of Arts and Crafts, and at the Sant Jordi School of Fine Arts in Barcelona between 1952 and 1956. In 1953 he held his first exhibition showing an expressionist style and existential resonance. The Municipal Museum of Mataró hosted his first individual exhibition in 1955 and shortly after he was one of the founders of the "Grupo Silex" together with Carles Planell, Eduard Alcoy y Lázaro and Josep Maria Rovira y Requesón.2 In 1957 he moved to Paris where he studied engraving and lithography at the School of Fine Arts, adopting a geometric figuration where solitary elements (fruit, cups, eggs, etc.) stand out on backgrounds and smooth fields of stripes of gray and green colors with the inclusion of mathematical elements such as grids, which suggest a magical atmosphere. Until the mid-eighties he did not return to Informalism. His work begins to be characterized by the use of a palette of only black and white.
Since 1977 he worked as a teacher at the Sant Jordi School of Fine Arts in Barcelona, combining his creative activity with his teaching work. From 1980 he was part of the activities commission of the Miró Foundation in Barcelona. In 1989 he became a professor of painting at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Barcelona, where in 1992 he was appointed Dean. Since 1997 he was an academic of Fine Arts.3
In 1993 the Reina Sofía National Art Center held an anthological exhibition called 'Spaces of Silence'.4 He died on December 28, 2005.5 In 2011 the Moscow Museum of Modern Art held an exhibition entitled Retrospective on his work.6
