Lluís Barba

Lluís Barba was born in Barcelona in 1952 and educated at the Escola Massana Centre d'Art there. He is a multidisciplinary artist who works in painting, photography, sculpture and video art, and he lives and works in Barcelona. The year 2025 marked fifty years since he first emerged as an artist, and over those decades he has become one of the most widely collected contemporary artists of his generation.

Barba's epic, digitally manipulated images juxtapose iconic paintings from art history with photographs of modern tourists, celebrities, spectators of varied economic backgrounds and appropriated advertising imagery. They critique the collusion between art, wealth and glamour, particularly within museum and gallery spaces, and the rise of art tourism around cultural landmarks. His series Tourists in Art, Travellers in Time and Self-portraits are characterized by his interpretation of the masterpieces of the past, crossing boundaries through the addition of pop icons and figures from the cultural world: artists, curators, filmmakers, thinkers, religious and political figures. A recurring barcode tattoo marks these figures as a symbol of lost identity, alienation and mass consumption, and he invents stereotypes such as military uniforms in floral patterns bearing ice cream instead of guns to demystify the imagery of aggression and control. His works probe consumerism, globalization and the drift from the spiritual toward a materialistic world of adored brands, and he criticizes society's dramas in the hope that the more the atrocity is seen, the more impact it may have.

Barba admires art history and respects the old masters. One body of work offers a contemporary reading of the Prado Museum's Spanish and Dutch masterpieces of the Golden Age, with particular emphasis on Velázquez, El Greco, Goya, Bosch and Brueghel and on the relationship the Spanish school maintained with foreign artists; as he has said, the works by the great masters at the Prado have been a key issue in his inspiration. For the 500th anniversary of Hieronymus Bosch in 2016 he reworked The Garden of Earthly Delights, and in his Goya series, drawn from Los Caprichos and Los Disparates, he sets Goya's dramatic light and dark subjects against modern icons such as Piet Mondrian, Jeff Koons, Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, reinterpreting Goya's legacy with sarcasm, cultural fusion and a distinctly digital, mixed-media approach.

Barba first exhibited in New York in 1987 and through the 1990s showed in Barcelona, Brussels, Paris, Caracas and, with Jacob Karpio Gallery, in Costa Rica, in series that moved from Vestigis and Agressions to Clonation, Homologation, Emissions, Digital Memory and Secretions. He has had solo exhibitions at the Jacobo Borges Museum in Caracas (Codes, 1997), Fundació Vila Casas in Barcelona (Travel in Time, 2015, curated by Glòria Bosch), Cynthia Corbett Gallery in London, Galerie Lausberg in Toronto, Dean Project Gallery and Baker Sponder Gallery in Miami, and solo presentations at the LA Art Show, Realisme Art Fair Amsterdam and Pinta London. He has taken part in the Cairo Biennial (1998), the Lima Biennial (1997), the Havana Biennial (2003 and 2009), the Casablanca Biennale (2016) and Personal Structures at the 57th Venice Biennale (2017), and in exhibitions at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, CAC Málaga, the Fondazione Giorgio Cini in Venice and the Sofía Imber Museum of Contemporary Art in Caracas.

His work is held by the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, MACBA in Barcelona, the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, the Wifredo Lam Center in Havana, the Sofía Imber, Alejandro Otero and Jacobo Borges museums in Caracas, the Museo de Diseño y Arte Contemporáneo de Costa Rica, the Marugame Hirai Museum in Japan, the national museums of Amman and Cairo, Fundació La Caixa and Fundació Lluís Carulla in Barcelona, and numerous corporate and private collections in London, New York, Miami and Paris.