Lluís Marsans

Lluís Marsans i Julià (31 December 1930 – 16 January 2015 ) was a Catalan painter. Born in Barcelona to a wealthy family, he grew up in Paris, and in 1947 traveled to Mexico and the United States. In 1948 he returned to Barcelona where he studied painting with Ramon Rogent and became loosely associated with the Dau al Set group. In the mid-1950s he became friends with Marcel Duchamp. In the mid-1960s, he destroyed the abstract art he had been making and, influenced by Ramón Gaya, dedicated himself to figurative work. In 1980 he had a solo exhibition at Galerie Claude Bernard, Paris. Described as a realist, Marsans says of his relationship to realism: "One cannot paint what one sees.... One can only paint what one remembers.... It [realism] is the identification with some realities from the past".