XAVIER VALLS SUBIR? (Barcelona, 1923 - 2006).
"La coline", 1962.
Oil on canvas.
It presents restorations in the central area.
Signed in the lower right corner. Signed, dated and titled on the back.
Measurements: 33 x 41 cm; 39 x 47 cm (frame).

Xavier Valls initiated his formation in the Massana School with Charles Collet, who put him in contact with Hugué, Sunyer, Roig, Artigas, Villà and others. During his first years he obtained several awards, such as the first prize at the V Salón de Otoño de Palma de Mallorca (1946). He received a scholarship from the French Institute of Barcelona in 1949, and that same year he settled in Paris. He remained there until his death, although he spent his summers in Horta, the neighborhood of Barcelona where he was born. In the French capital he participated in the Salon of Young Painters (1952), the Salon of the Independents and the Autumn Salon (1953), and also took part in the October Salons of Barcelona and the Third Hispano-American Biennial, held in that city in 1955, where he won the prize for the best still life. He worked sporadically in Barcelona, designing stained glass windows for churches and holding personal exhibitions in the Syra (1951) and Vayreda (1953, 1956 and 1959). He also organized solo exhibitions in Madrid (1975), Mallorca (1977) and Paris, the latter city in which his exhibitions held at the Henriette Gomès gallery since 1963, which earned him an important international projection. In 1979 he was awarded the Cáceres prize for painting and was named Knight of Arts and Letters of France. The retrospective exhibition he held in 1981 at the Ingres Museum in Montauban (France) was followed by others in Madrid (1982) and Barcelona (1985). He was also the subject of several awards, including the retrospective dedicated to him by the Ministry in 1982, the Gold Medal of Fine Arts in 1993, and the National Prize awarded to him by the Catalan Generalitat in 2000. His work, elaborated with slowness and precision, focuses especially on interiors, landscapes and still lifes of a geometrically rooted compositional asceticism, marked by the economy of elements. His language will be progressively refined, in relation to his personal way of conceiving painting, related to the subtle world of the works of Seurat and Morandi, that of the mobile immobility of the nature of things. His language is not prone to spectacular changes, but to deepen and decant, form and content, the world that interests him. In any case, such was the sophistication and exquisite sensitivity of Valls that he could not go unnoticed in the French art world, where he was always highly respected. Valls is currently represented in the MACBA Museums in Barcelona, Paris, Marseille and Tokyo, the Reina Sofía in Madrid and the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Patio Herreriano in Valladolid.