“Born in 1957 in Sabadell, Spain (near Barcelona), Agustí Puig came of age as an artist in the 1980s, a decade of multiple returns.  Foremost was the resurgence of painting’s status as a progressive medium in both the United States and in Europe: as a corrective to the cool austerity of conceptual art and the ephemerality of performance, there was a palpable desire among artists and viewers alike to interact with sensuous objects. The mechanistic aesthetic of Photorealism gave way to a renewal of the expressive gesture, which had fallen out of fashion since the heyday of Abstract Expressionism in the 1950s. But expressionism in the 1980s did not necessarily appear in tandem with abstraction, as figurative painting made a decisive comeback as well. Along with the return of the figure came content, narrative, myth, and symbolism, all of which were previously decried by Modernist critics as retrograde. As with the Neo-Expressionists in Germany and the Transavantguardia in Italy, Puig was among the artists who began again to grapple with the ability of painting to picture ineffable sensations that lay beyond the contours of the ordinary sensible world.”*

Franklin Bowles Galleries is proud to represent Agustí Puig since 2012 to a growing international audience.