XAVIER GRAU MASIP (Barcelona, 1951).Untitled, 1996.Monotype.Hand signed and dated.Size: 50 x 70 cm (print); 64 x 83 cm (paper).Xavier Grau trained at the School of Fine Arts in Barcelona where, years later, he taught for a time. He started out in conceptual art, but from 1976 he devoted himself fully to painting. That same year he took part in the exhibition "Por una crítica de la pintura" in Barcelona, with a group of artists from the "Trama" magazine. He belonged to the current known as "painting-painting", which arose in reaction to conceptualism and which was very strong in Catalonia, vindicating pictorial practice from the perspective of abstract language. Grau was close to abstract expressionism as a source of expressiveness and emotion, akin to the New York school, De Kooning, Gorky and Gouston, and his language evolved towards an abstraction that maintained the internal tension between colour and drawing without reducing the vividness of the colour or the movement of its surfaces, contained by a rhythmic formal structure. Thus, although initially the theoretical aspects prevailed in his work, they gradually gave way to intuition and the enhancement of gesture and colour. His work increasingly tends to leave figurative references to one side in favour of a less evident but also more internalised reflection. In recent years, Grau has progressively stripped his work of figurative allusions, erasing with them the satire influenced by Guston, on the way to a more silent and introspective painting. His personal exhibitions include those held at the Maeght gallery in Paris (1989), the Salvador Riera and Carles Taché galleries in Barcelona (1992; 1994 and 1995), the Luis Adelantado gallery in Valencia (1993) and the Antonio Machón gallery in Madrid (2002). He is represented at the Museo Patio Herreriano in Valladolid, the MACBA in Barcelona, the Centro Conde Duque in Madrid and the Jaume Morera in Lleida.