MONTSERRAT CLAUSELLS

Montserrat Clausells, Barcelona 1960.

 

Born and brought up in a family dedicated to the arts, she very soon and quite naturally began to take an interest in art and practise it.

When it came to choosing a career and planning her professional future, she turned to journalism and graduated from the Autonomous University of Barcelona.

Later, when her interest in art came to take first place over everything else, she entered the Faculty of Fine Arts, but her stay there was a short one. In those days, an artist’s training followed paths that were very different to academic paths. She became interested in alternative movements in the feverish, creative and somewhat desperate Barcelona of the ‘80s. She was closely involved in the foundation of the Mec-Mec gallery in Carrer Assahonadors, one of the active centres in the countercultural Barcelona of the time, where Ocaña, Mariscal and others held their first exhibitions. She also took part in the residencies for artists of the X. Corberó Foundation.

With a grant from the Department of Culture of the Generalitat de Catalunya, she spent a year living in London, where she took a Diploma in Art at the Byam Shaw School of Art.

Since then, she has devoted herself full-time to artistic expression through painting, drawing and photography.

She has taken part in the Elsa Peretti Foundation’s programmes for artists, working and travelling between New York and Barcelona.

In 2006, at the initiative of Sofía Barroso, AroundArt, and with backing from the Elsa Peretti Foundation, she travelled to Nepal and spent several months living in the city of Bhaktapur, home to the Kathmandu University of Art, where she gave classes in ‘Introduction to Abstract Art’.

At present, she lives and works in Barcelona. Her work feeds off the inspiration of her travels and life experience between East and West.