Marta Palau

Marta Palau Bosch (17 July 1934 – 13 August 2022) was a Spanish-Mexican artist who resided in Mexico. She worked in engraving, painting, sculpture, and most prominently in tapestries, defining herself by her profound artistic use and arrangement of native Mexican natural materials. She was one of the first Mexican artists to focus on themes around women's and immigrants' experiences during the 1970s, especially in her Ilerda series of tapestries

Early life Marta Palau Bosch was born on 17 July 1934 in Albesa, Spain. Her engraving professor at the institute was the Colombian engraver Guillermo Silva Santamaría. Some of the artists involved were Helen Escobedo, Lilia Carrillo, Gilberto Aceves Navarro, , Manuel Felguérez, Vicente Rojo, Fernando Garcia Ponce, Brian Nissen, and , among others.

From 1973 to 1976, Palau Bosch served as coordinator of the Centre d'Art Modern de Guadalajara, Jalisco. At the beginning of the 1980s she created an experimental workshop in Havana.

In 1981, Palau Bosch presented an homage to the former Mexican president Lázaro Cárdenas del Río, in Jiquilpan, in thanks for his work accepting refugees from the Spanish Republican Party into Mexico after the Spanish Civil War. The silk-screen prints that she exhibited there are some of the works that most closely reflect her personal history.

In her own words she related this aspect of her life:No fui consciente de lo que Lázaro Cárdenas había hecho, por mis padres y por muchos otros republicanos españoles, hasta años después de mi llegada a México. No fui consciente de lo que significaba vivir en el exilio lejos de una patria donde la justicia había sido pisoteada y arrastrada por el fascismo. Yo era demasiado pequeña cuando llegué a México para darme cuenta del dolor que representaba todo esto. Supe más tarde que Lázaro Cárdenas era el hombre que había dado una segunda patria y una nueva nacionalidad a los refugiados españoles. A mí me dio la única que he tenido siempre, pues la otra, la española, la había perdido antes de ganarla.|Rita Eder, Marta Palau. La intuición y la técnica. She has also had an important artistic presence in the United States, Spain, and in various Latin American countries.

In 1996, Palau Bosch organized the first Salón Internacional de Estandartes ('International Banner Biennial'), which in her words "serves to introduce artists from Baja California to international circles, as representatives of the vigorous cultural movement that has surged on our border during the last ten years." The Salon had its first three editions (1996, 1997, 1998), later converting to a biannual exhibition. The artist was responsible for recovering the use of the banner as a technique to reflect the specific problems inherent in the border. The 2010 Biennial convened 37 artists from Latin America and the United States, with special emphasis on border zones. Also, the format of the banner combined with the particular museography and display required by the Centro Cultural Tijuana imposed new possibilities and technical challenges on the artists. Emilio Carballido comments: "The inventor of everything, Marta Palau, at the Centro Cultural Tijuana, has had to do something new. That's what the art of the world owes them now. And of course the art of Mexico."

In 1998, Palau Bosch conceived and directed an ambitious international show at the Museum of the City of Mexico titled Cinco continentes y una ciudad ('Five Continents and a City'), for which she invited a curator from each continent. This exhibit returned in 2015 for a second edition.

The artist was a member of the consulting group for the Museo de Mujeres Artistas Mexicanas (MUMA) since its formation in 2008, together with artists and art students such as Ana Quiroz, Karen Cordero, Grace Quintanilla and Mónica Mayer. The mission of this museum is to record the history of Mexican women in the visual arts during the 20th Century. She resided in Tijuana part of the time, and the other part in Mexico City. In incorporating materials such as wire, cord, and fiber into her weaving, Palau and others such as Olga de Amaral, Myra Landau, and Feliciano Béjar, have created "a highly original form of aesthetic expression" specific to Latin America.

The exploration of tapestries serves an important role in her work. After having developed her techniques in engraving, during the 1970s she began to work with weavings, initially beginning with the serape. According to Raquel Tibol, in those years many artists were interested in weaving, which incited Palau Bosch to travel to Barcelona where she met Grau Garriga and assimilated his style. Her reevaluation of tapestry as a medium led to a reconsideration of the division between the artist and the artisan: when the former returns to a technique relegated to the "lower arts", they recover their status as a manual worker. For Tibol, the value of the artist's works woven with henequen, wool or synthetic yarns align them more with the world of sculpture. However, she uses her works to develop ideas around specific themes, such as the critique of censorship and repression of the Franco dictatorship in Los Sellos de la España Sellada ('The Stamps of Stamped Spain') in 1976.

In 1970, the artist participated for the second time in the Salon Independiente, exhibiting Ambientación Alquímica ('Alchemical Atmosphere'), one of her most well known pieces that currently forms part of the standing collection of the Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo. It is an open, walk-in structure with movable wooden wall panels and geometric forms made from carton and newsprint, with numbers and syllables painted on it that form the word Tetragramaton. While inside it, the spectator becomes an active and ludic element in the work itself, a concept that had barely begun to be explored in that time.

"a talisman of strength and protection, in which the public participates, because part of the joke is that you have to enter, and upon doing so, the doors revolve and the same image appears over and over: a triangle based in alchemy, in the name of God that should not be spoken, Yahweh, that is divided into 4 letters, that is 4 syllables" (translation)Her later works consist of installations and tapestries made with natural materials such as coco fibers and dyed corn husks. The ensemble of pieces titled Mis caminos son Terrestres ('My Roads are Lands') has been interpreted by as approaching an identity somewhere between the structure of myth and art.

In her installation Nomadas II, Palau plays with the dimensions of a series of sizes of disembodied outstretched feet, referencing cave paintings made by early humans found in the rockshelters of Baja California.

In Doble Muro, the artist comments on the issue of undocumented immigrants and the proposed border wall between the United States and Mexico, by creating a structure of two walls on a base of wooden columns. Inside, on the floor of the structure is the outline of a human body woven with fibers, surrounded by the 2 symbolical walls, evoking the chalk silhouettes made by police or medical personnel to demarcate the position of a cadaver on the ground.

In 1995, the artist published a children's book titled Cueva Pintada ('Painted Cave'), published by the Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, in conjunction with the Centro Cultural Tijuana and Teléfonos del Noroeste. In the book, she narrates a legend about the pictographic cave paintings in Baja California which are the subject of the accompanying illustrations.

Exhibitions

Selected exhibitions: 2014. La raiz. (Homenaje a Emilio Carballido), Centro Cultural de Córdoba, Córdoba, Mexico. 2012. Tránsitos de Naualli, Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes, México. 2010. Four Rooms and a View/Mexican Masters. Fisher Museum of Art, University of Southern California, Los Angeles. 2007. Homenaje a Emilio Carballido, Centro Cultural Tijuana, Tijuana, Mexico. 2004. Front-era / triángulo. Lo uno y lo múltiple/Todas las guerras, Museum of Contemporary Art, La Jolla, San Diego. 2003. Lo uno y lo múltiple, Galería de Arte Contemporáneo y Diseño. 2003. Todas las guerras, 3 installations, Fisher Gallery, University of Southern California, Los Angeles. 2002. Nómadas II, Universitat de Lleida, Aula Magna, Sala Victor Siurana. 2001. Los que quedan -muro transitable-, Museo de las Californias, CECUT, Tijuana. 1990. Naualli. Museo de Arte Moderno del Centro Cultural Mexiquense, Toluca, Mexico 1985. Mis caminos son terrestres, Sala Nacional, Palacio de Bellas Artes, Mexico 1981. Un homenaje artístico a Lázaro Cárdenas, Museo de Arte Moderno. 1993, 1997, 2003 Creador Artístico Award, Fondo Nacional para La Cultura y las Artes, Mexico. 2008 Orden de la Independencia Cultural Rubén Darío (Nicaragua) 2002 Doctorate Honoris Causa , Universitat de Lleida (Spain) 2018 Medalla Bellas Artes en Artes Visuales, Centro Cultural Tijuana (Mexico)

Publications (as illustrator)