• Josep Riera i Aragó
    （Spain , b. 1954）

    Josep Riera i Aragó (b. 1954, Spain), a graduate of the Sant Jordi Royal Academy of Fine Arts and currently based in Barcelona, is among Spain’s most internationally acclaimed contemporary artists. His work explores voyages between sky and sea, employing mechanical elements such as propellers, submarines, and airplanes to construct a poetic narrative of time, space, and life. His solo exhibitions include the Städtisches Museum Heilbronn (Germany), the Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles (France), and the Fundació Joan Miró in Barcelona. Permanent collections including the Fondation Vincent van Gogh, the Fundació Joan Miró, and the Boeing Company headquarters in Chicago.

    The exhibition title, Josep Riera i Aragó: The Voyage of Life — Half-Century Journey into the Unknown, speaks to the essence of Aragó’s practice. For the artist, the machines that populate his work — airplanes, propellers, submarines, and ships — signify voyage itself, transcending their functional mechanical purpose to become meditations on the passage of time, the journey of life, and the pursuit of dreams. These symbols traverse imagined landscapes of time and space, composing an endless poetic voyage.

    Aragó’s artistic evolution has unfolded across decades. In his early works of the 1970s, he focused on documenting daily life through visual symbols, capturing the experience of 365 days — a period that laid the foundation for his personal artistic vocabulary. In the 1980s, he began exploring themes of machinery and the deep sea, experimenting with lead, zinc, and other metals to create reliefs and sculptures. During this period, he incorporated mechanical parts, beach debris, and wood into his bronze sculptures. His landmark works of the 1990s include Gran avió d’hèlix vermella (commissioned by Barcelona City Hall), Red Propeller Airplane, and Submarine on the Wall (created for the Städtisches Museum Heilbronn), as well as Airplane 1.05PM (created for the Fondation Vincent van Gogh). Entering the twenty-first century, Aragó has continued to develop his artistic lexicon, creating sculptures and paintings that articulate a mechanical aesthetic while emphasizing themes of balance and movement. The Spanish contemporary art critic Alfonso de la Torre has praised his work thus: “Poetic, like a dialogue of metaphor and delicate language, Aragó captures the fleeting flicker of light, allowing finite things to traverse the realm of imagination.”

    Across half a century of artistic inquiry, Aragó has “collaged” hard media such as bronze and steel with wood and fabric. This reassembly of disparate materials is not merely a formal visual experiment, but a means of summoning the collective memory and warmth embedded within the materials themselves. For Aragó, the ultimate core of this fifty-year voyage lies in human emotion. Those seemingly cold mechanical components, through his collaging hand, are transformed into living entities that seem to breathe — conveying humanity’s longing, solitude, and courage in the face of the unknown. Every weld seam, every patch of rust, bears witness to the gradual infusion of personal and generational emotion into matter, rendering his works bridges between bodily sensation and the depths of the soul.

    This solo exhibition, Josep Riera i Aragó: The Voyage of Life — Half-Century Journey into the Unknown, presents multiple series and several museum-caliber masterworks. The “Flight Series” features Haiku, a six-meter horizontal scroll unfolding with the lightness and flow of verse. Simplified propeller motifs are scattered throughout, distilling a serene rhythm of time, space, and life within the interplay of negative space and cadence. The “Australia” manuscript series draws upon family chronicle documents dating from 1735 to 1871; upon these historical pages, the artist intervenes with painted symbols, weaving imagery of flight and movement into the traces of writing and reconstructing the trajectories of memory and imagination through layered strata of time. The “Lead Series” unfolds in deep blue tones, evoking the vast expanse of the deep sea, where submarine-like forms slowly emerge, advancing silently and unceasingly. Underwater Journey employs a circular composition that functions as an observational porthole, drawing the viewer’s gaze into the darkened depths to experience the sedimentation of time and the poetics of solitude. The “Sculpture Series” employs brass and iron to construct spare, distilled forms of flying vessels — propellers and fuselages transformed into a symbolic vocabulary that, through its poised equilibrium, reveals the poetry of motion, time, and existence.

    Josep Riera i Aragó’s half-century artistic journey is a voyage filled with challenge, discovery, and reflection. Ultimately, this voyage transcends discussions of technique and medium, returning to the essential exploration of life itself. This exhibition invites viewers to come aboard, to sense — beneath the surface of mechanical aesthetics — the unwavering warmth of feeling that has persisted across five decades. When we contemplate these forms voyaging between sky and sea, we no longer see mere machines, but the eternal cadence of the human soul setting forth toward the unknown in search of belonging.

    • Collection Fundació Joan Miró
    • Sant Cugat del Valles, Spain
    • Collection Nishinomiya City Hall, Japan
    • Musée d’art moderne André Malraux
    • 2011 Musée d’Art moderne de Céret 塞雷現代藝術博物館

    Diary- from 7 March 1982 – 6 March 1983

    Solo Exhibitions

    2026 Josep Riera i Aragó : The Voyage of Life— Half-Century Journey into the Unknown,  Bluerider Art, Taipei, Taiwan
    2026 JOSEP RIERA I ARAGÓ：Sailing the Sky ,BOISSERÉE GALLERY, Germany
    2025  Josep Riera i Aragó: Timeless Odyssey, Bluerider Art, London, UK
    2024  Josep Riera i Aragó. Slient Voyage. Matthew Liu Fine Art, Shanghai, China
    2023  Josep Riera i Aragó. The Voyage. Bluerider Art. Taipei, Taiwan
    2023  Josep Riera i Aragó. Der Traum-Reisende. Galerie Boisserėe, Kōln. Alemania
    2022  Josep Riera i Aragó. El bell viatge. Galeria Marlborough. Barcelona. España
    2021 Josep Riera i Aragó. El viaje silencioso. Galeria Marlborough. Madrid, España
    2018 Josep Riera i Aragó. La mirada del geógrafo. Galeria Marlborough, Barcelona. Spain
    2018 Galerie Baudoin Lebon. At Élysées, Paris, Francia
    2018 Josep Riera I Aragó, Submarins 1985-2018. Fundació Fran Daurel Perramón de Ventalló, Ventalló, Girona, Spain
    2017 Art and Advice Gallery, Hasselt, Belgium
    2016 Skulpturen, Bilder, Zeichnungen, Galerie Franz Swetec, Darmstadt-Griesheim, Germany
    2016 Obra sobre paper i escultures 1988-2015, Galeria Eude, Barcelona, Spain
    2016 Oeuvres récentes, Galerie Art Set, Limoges, France
    2015 Art Karlsruhe, Galerie Franz Swetec, Karlsruhe, Germany
    2015 Skulpturen, Bilder, Zeichnungen, Galerie Franz Swetec, Düsseldorf, Germany
    2015 Galeria Sa Pleta Freda, Son Servera, Mallorca, Spain
    2014 Josep Riera i Aragó Explorations, Fondation Folon, La Hulpe, Belgium
    2014 Summer solstici – Rituals, Tasende Gallery, La Jolla, San Diego,USA
    2013 Josep Riera i Aragó, Aguafuertes, Instituto Cervantes, Hamburg, Germany
    2013 Josep Riera i Aragó, Aguafuertes, Instituto Cervantes, Bremen, Germany
    2013 Josep Riera i Aragó, Prints, Art Partners Finland Oy, Helsinki, Finland
    2013 Josep Riera i Aragó 11-12-13, Galerie Baudoin Lebon, Paris, France.
    2012 Riera i Aragó, Aguafuertes, Instituto Cervantes, Atenas, Greece
    2012 Josep Riera i Aragó, Galerie Art Set , Limoges, France
    2012 Josep Riera i Aragó, Aguafuertes, Instituto Cervantes, Varsovia, Poland
    2012 Josep Riera i Aragó, Aguafuertes, Instituto Cervantes, Cracovia, Poland
    2012 Le rêve du navigateur, Musée d’art moderne André Malraux – MuMa, Le Havre, France
    2012 Josep Riera i Aragó, Instituto Cervantes, Frankfurt, Germany
    2011 Le rêve du navigateur, Musée d’art Moderne de Céret i Musée de Collioure, France
    2011 Obres Selectes, Michael Dunev Art Projects, Torroella de Montgrí, Girona, Spain
    2010 JOSEP RIERA I ARAGÓ. 6.684. Galeria Joan Prats-Artgràfic. Barcelona, Spain
    2009 Galerie Hüsstege, Hertogenbosch, Netherlands
    2009 JOSEP RIERA I ARAGÓ. Wege unter dem Waser. Camins sota l’aigua. Kunst Galerie Fürth, Fürth, Germany
    2007 Art Ámsterdam, Artline Gallery. Amsterdam, Nertherlands
    2007 Artline Gallery, Amsterdam, Netherlands
    2007 Espècies protegides Galeria Joan Prats-Artgràfic, Barcelona, Spain
    2007 Galeria Múltiple, Madrid, Spain
    2006 Galerie Hüsstege, Hertogenbosch, Netherlands
    2006 Arals Meet the North Sea, Beaufort 2006,  Bredene, PMMK Museum, Belgium
    2006 Aguafuertes, Museo Murallas Reales, Ceuta, Spain
    2006 Hauser Hofmann, Kunst-Art-Arte, Thayngen, Switzerland
    2006 Galeria Arcadi Calzada, Olot, Girona, Spain
    2006 Aguafuertes, Musée d’Aalst, Aalst, Belgium
    2005 Galerie De Rijk, Den Haag, Netherlands
    2005 SE7 Espai d’Art, Xàbia, Alacant, Spain
    2005 Michael Dunev Art Projets, Torroella de Montgrí, Girona, Spain
    2005 Galeria El Carme, Vic, Spain
    2005 Paul Greenaway Gallery, Adelaide, Australia
    2004 Illes, Barques, Icebergs. Galeria Joan Prats-Artgràfic, Barcelona, Spain
    2004 Los años 80, Galeria Alejandro Sales, Barcelona, Spain
    2004 Galerie Denise Van de Velde, Aalst, Belgium
    2004 Riera i Aragó, Aiguaforts, Caixa de Girona, Girona, Spain
    2003 Galerie Levy, Hamburg, Germany
    2003 Galerie Hüsstege, Hertogenbosch, Netherlands
    2003 Tasende Gallery, Los Angeles, USA
    2003 Tasende Gallery, La Jolla, San Diego, USA
    2002 Galerie De Rijk, Den Haag, Netherlands
    2002 Lowe Gallery, Atlanta, USA
    2002 Galeria Pelaires, Palma de Mallorca, Spain
    2001 Galerie Indigo, Damme, Belgium
    2001 19 màquines en vol, Museu d’Història de la Ciutat, Girona, Spain
    2001 Galerie Denise Van de Velde, Aalst, Belgium
    2001 Lowe Gallery, Atlanta, USA
    2000 Galerie Hüsstege, Hertogenbosch, Netherlands
    2000 Galerie de Rijk, Den Haag, Netherlands
    2000 Galeria Joan Prats, Barcelona, Spain
    1999 Col.legi d’Arquitectes de Girona, Girona, Spain
    1999 Sala Cai Luzán, Zaragoza, Spain
    1998 Art Miami 98, Galeria Joan Prats, Miami,USA
    1998 Galeria Era Bauró, Andorra.
    1998 Galeria Joan Prats, New York, USA
    1998 Galeria Pelaires, Palma de Mallorca Spain
    1998 Galeria Rosa Pous, Girona Spain
    1998 Riera i Aragó a Cap Roig, Fundació Caixa de Girona, Palafrugell, Girona Spain
    1998 Riera i Aragó Escultures, Parc Nou d’Olot, Girona, Spain
    1998 Galerie La Cité, Luxembourg.
    1998 Galerie de Rijk, Den Haag, Netherlands
    1998 Art Cologne’98, Galerie Franz Swetec, Colònia, Germany.
    1998 Galerie Franz Swetec, Darmstadt, Germany
    1998 Riera i Aragó, Galería Zaragoza Gráfica, Zaragoza, Spain
    1997 Galeria d’Art Arcadi Calzada, Olot, Girona, Spain
    1997 PMMK, Museum voor Moderne Kunst, Oostende, Belgium.
    1997 Galeria d’Art Horizon, Colera, Girona, Spain
    1997 Galerie Denise Van de Velde, Aalst, Belgium
    1997 Artline Gallery, Amsterdam, Netherlands
    1997 Galerie Pro Arte, Friburg, Germany
    1997 Künst ’97, Zürich, Galerie Denise Van de Velde, Switzerland
    1997 Festival Garonne, Pont Neuf, Toulousse, France
    1997 Galerie Hüsstege, Hertogenbosch, Netherlands
    1996 Galería Garcés Velásquez, Bogotà, Colombia.
    1996 Galeria Joan Prats, Barcelona, Spain
    1996 Art Cologne ’96, Galerie Boisserée, Köln, Germany
    1996 Städtische Museen, Heilbronn,Germany
    1996 Fondation Vincent van Gogh, Arles, France
    1996 Casal Solleric, Ajuntament de Palma, Palma de Mallorca, Spain
    1995 Galeria Joan Prats – Artgràfic, Barcelona, Spain
    1995 Galerie Marwan Hoss, París, France
    1995 Galeria Cyprus, Sant Feliu de Boada, Girona, Spain
    1995 Galerie La Cité, Luxembourg.
    1995 Galerie Denise Van de Velde, Aalst, Belgium
    1994 ARCO ’94, Galerie Denise Van de Velde, Madrid, Spain
    1994 Galerie Denise Van de Velde, Aalst, Belgium
    1993 Galeria Rita García, València, Belgium
    1993 ARCO ’93, Galerie Denise Van de Velde, Madrid, Spain
    1993 Galeria Sa Pleta Freda, Son Servera, Mallorca, Spain
    1993 Estampa ’93, Boza Editor, Madrid, Spain
    1993 Galeria Era Bauro, Andorra.
    1993 Art Multiple ’93, Boza Editor, Düsseldorf, Germany
    1993 Galeria Joan Mas. Aiguaforts. Cadaqués, Girona, Spain
    1993 Bibliothèque Nationale, Boza Editor, París, France
    1992 ARCO ’92, Galerie Denise Van de Velde, Madrid.
    1992 ARCO ’92, Vera Van Laer Gallery, Madrid.
    1991 ARCO ’91, Vera Van Laer Gallery, Madrid.
    1991 ARCO ’91, Galerie Denise Van de Velde, Madrid.
    1991 Franz Swetec Gallery, Düsseldorf, Germany
    1991 Galeria Joan Prats – Artgràfic, Barcelona, Spain
    1991 Galeria 13, Ventalló, Girona, Spain
    1990 Vera Van Laer Gallery, Knokke, Belgium
    1990 Galerie La Cité, Luxembourg
    1989 Galerie Boisserée, Colònia, Germany
    1989 Arran d’aire, Antic Escorxador, Figueres, Girona, Spain
    1989 Musée d’Art Moderne, Collioure, France
    1989 Museu de Ceret, Ceret, France
    1989 Galerie Boulakia, París, France
    1989 FIAC’89, Galerie Boulakia, Paris, France
    1988 Galería Columela, Madrid, Spain
    1988 Galeria Sebastià Petit, Lleida, Spain
    1988 Galeria Contemporáneo, Jesi, Italy .
    1988 Galerie Denise Van de Velde, Aalst, Belgium
    1988 Galeria 24, Barcelona, Spain
    1987 ARCO ’87, Galeria Rene Metras. Espai Joan Mas, Madrid.
    1986 Galeria Guereta, Barcelona, Spain
    1985 Galeria Joan Prats, Barcelona, Spain
    1984 Espai 10, Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona, Spain
    1983 Molí Casals, Calonge, Girona, Spain
    1981 Institut d’Estudis Nord-americans, Barcelona, Spain
    1980 Galeria Gurb 63, Vic, Barcelona, Spain
    1980 Galeria Artema, Barcelona, Spain
    1979 Galeria Vergara Ocho, Barcelona, Spain
    1979 Galeria Tamariu, Palafrugell, Girona, Spain
    1979 Galeria Palau de Caramany, Girona, Spain
    1978 Galeria Roma, Barcelona, Spain
    1978 Galeria Tamariu, Palafrugell, Girona, Spain
    1977 Galeria Bonanova, Barcelona, Spain
    1977 Art Galeria Covarsi, Arenys de Mar, Barcelona. Spain
    1975 Galeria Anglada, Barcelona, Spain
    1975 Galeria Estudi Athenea, Barcelona, Spain
    1974 Galeria Anglada, Barcelona, Spain
    1973 Galeria Anglada, Barcelona, Spain

    WORKS IN MUSEUMS AND SELECTED COLLECTIONS

    Ajuntament de Barcelona (Escultura pública)
    Ajuntament de Figueres, Girona (Escultura pública)
    Ajuntament de Sant Cugat, Barcelona (Escultura pública)
    CODA Museum, Apeldoorn, Países Bajos
    Col.lecció Institut d’Estudis Catalans, Barcelona
    Col.lecció Institut d’Estudis Nord-americans, Barcelona
    Col.lecció Testimoni. Fundació “La Caixa”, Barcelona
    Col·lecció Bassat d’Art Contemporani, Barcelona
    Col·lecció Creu Roja de Catalunya, Barcelona
    Colección BBVA, Madrid, Spain
    Colección CAI Luzán, Zaragoza
    Colección OlorVisual, Ernesto Ventós, Barcelona
    Coleccion Pere Serra, Soller, Mallorca 
    Colección Rega, Zürich, Suiza
    Collectie NOG Van Het. SNS Reaal Fonds, Países Bajos
    Fondation Vincent Van Gogh, Arles, Francia
    Fons d’art del diari Avui, Barcelona
    Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona
    Fundació Perramón de Ventalló Art Contemporani, Ventalló, Girona
    Fundación Fran Daurel, Barcelona
    Municipality of Roosendaal, Paises Bajos (Escultura pública)
    Museu d’Art contemporani, MACBA, Barcelona
    Musée d’art moderne André Malraux, MuMa Le Havre, Francia
    Musée d’Art Moderne, Luxembourg
    Musée d’art moderne de Céret, Francia
    Musée de Collioure, Francia
    Musée Réattu, Arles, Francia
    Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Union Fenosa, La Coruña
    Museu Arxiu de Llavaneres, Barcelona
    Museu Can Framis, Fundació Vilacasas, Barcelona
    Museu Can Mario, Fundació Vilacasas, Palafrugell, Girona
    Museu d’Historia de la Ciutat, Girona
    Museu de l’Hospitalet, Hospitalet de Llobregat
    Museu de Montserrat, Barcelona
    Museu de Valls, Tarragona
    Museum Otani, Nishinomiya, Japón
    Nishinomiya City Hall, Japón (Escultura pública)
    Parc d’escultures Jardins de Cap Roig, Obra Social La Caixa, Girona
    Reflex Museum, Amsterdam, Países Bajos
    Stiftung Nantesbusch Sammlung, München, Alemania
    Stadhuis Mesen, Bélgica (Escultura pública)
    Städtische Museen, Heilbronn, Alemania
    Stedelijk Museum Schiedam, Países Bajos
    The Boeing Company, Chicago, USA
    Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona
    Universitat Ramon Llull, Barcelona

    Riera i Aragó: a journey through fifty years of experience

    Conxita Oliver

    Riera i Aragó is one of the artists who emerged and stood out in the eighties in Catalonia as part of a generation that reactivated sculpture, assimilating new concepts and object processes. Half a century after his first exhibition, the Marlborough Gallery presents "El bell viatge", an essential and very personal itinerary with a set of works that the artist has decided to keep throughout his career. Through its most significant stages, the guiding thread becomes the dysfunctional artifact capable of flying or navigating. Since its inception, its creation manifested itself as indebted to mechanics, physics and the inspiring principles of modern science, and also very close to a mythical and ancestral world. Three-dimensional compositions, ironic scenographies that can refer both to totemic themes of a magical and ritual dimension, as well as to technologies of modern society in reference to the critique of the irrational power of machines.

    The new Catalan sculpture that emerged in the 1980s opened up new paths, taking up the weight of the Catalan sculptural tradition, founded by Julio González and by a review of the key figures of the avant-garde. Riera i Aragó (Barcelona, 1954) is one of the protagonists of the recovery of the sculptural practice that the avant-garde of the thirties, starting with iron, had begun. As one of his followers, he maintains a special sensitivity for traditional materials that he often recycles to focus all of his plastic discourse around mythical scenes about machinery. In many cases, the passage of time is observed through these rescued materials and recomposed into witnesses of industrialization.

    Interested in mechanical gadgets, flying and aquatic devices, recreational physics and scientific-literary culture, he has produced a very characteristic playful and poetic iconography, inspired by the world of submarines, zeppelins, planes, propellers, wheels... all of this is the axis of many of his sculptures and installations. Some references that he has been debugging and loading with anti-war messages and awareness of climate change. The works of Riera i Aragó are essential for understanding some of the emblems of our time, where devices and hardware in general and their relationship with nature or ecological values are always present.

    Transgressor of situations, great nostalgic for the past and tireless traveler, the artist has often insisted on accentuating the archaeologist concept of his work with a catastrophic accent of abandoned marine vestiges or aged industrial residues due to the passage of time, always loaded with memory, since what is most interesting in Riera i Aragó is the footprint, the trace and the footprint. Around these references he has created a very personal cosmos that he has been formally synthesizing until reaching the current stage in which austerity and sobriety have evolved into mere skeletons, into light constructions of airlines that are drawn in space. His sculptures and paintings have ended up configuring a cartography of fantastic worlds and impossible mechanisms that, far from being an illusion, appear strangely tangible on a round trip from reality to fiction.

    The exhibition "The beautiful journey" allows us to travel a long and prolific journey, where we find the different materials, techniques and supports that Riera i Aragó has used to create its airplanes, submarines and different devices. It brings together a represented selection of works that are part of his private collection, that he has kept over the years and that are part of his most intimate work. Although the reference to the machine seems to be the main character, in reality it goes much further, as Vicenç Altaió points out in the catalog text: “I like it when Riera i Aragó explains that the pair of technological artifacts comes from the schematic sign of a man and a woman placed horizontally. Of standing in the recumbent body and its psychic transformation. The artist began his work by creating an iconicity of figurative signs, they are schematic drawings until, by reduction and personalization, the plane, a body that rises, becomes the first letter of the alphabet. ” A metamorphosis that changes these sculptures into anthropological approximations; in characters that become inhabitants of imagined spaces.

    The exhibition, conceived as a walk through the most recurring themes of his creation, begins in the eighties and ends today. But, if the fascination for the functional machine has been valued artistically throughout history, from the Renaissance to the present, on the contrary, the vision that Riera i Aragó grants to his ingenuity is to deny its usefulness and the its functionality. In this sense, this negation fascinates him because of the character of remainder or waste that it drags along: it transmutes the functions of the most modern submarine and ship or the most futuristic airplane until it metamorphoses them into useless gears, as a metaphor for the failure of the modern and technical era.

    His unique language began in 1981 when he set out to draw a picture of what happened during the day. It was an exercise that he completed for 365 days and during that time he also developed an interest in machines, the exploration of unknown landscapes and object recovery, without neglecting the artists he admired such as Miró and Klee. The artist himself affirms that thanks to this exercise, he found a series of formal symbols that have constituted the essence of everything he has done. It is during this time that he will begin to produce works using the remains of scrapped ships and the propellers will be more and more present in his works. Each country he visits, be it Morocco, Japan or Australia, inspires him to explore new territories and strengthen his own discourse.

    With a limited visual vocabulary, Riera i Aragó develops a fertile iconography loaded with meaning that, endowed with a clear irony, speaks of the absurd recklessness of man's creations when they turn against him. All of his work is anti-war, since for example when the submarine is presented as a ruin it is a criticism of our civilization of which only loopholes will remain. Along these lines, the installation Submarinos de las islas Baleares (1997) is very impressive, made up of seven hanging submarines with a diversification of the chromaticism of the patinas to such an extent that each element has a different chromatic finish. These marine remains become gigantic three-dimensional brushstrokes, with an arid gesture, a rustic body and solid residue, which collapse along the wall. Riera i Aragó's peculiar planes, represented only by a few propellers, are present in the exhibition in different works, such as 48 black planes (1992); an installation with forty-eight small-format flying utensils. Likewise, the great triptych Airplane (1987) brings us closer to the inventions of Leonardo da Vinci, through a kind of scientific diagrams that draw cryptic and hidden presences. Another recurring theme such as the seabed is represented by Mar y barca (1999), a structure, at ground level, made with bronze and gold leaf that sacralizes the waters of our oceans.

    The works in which sculpture and painting converge have been the subject of dedication by Riera i Aragó since l990, manifested between forms in real space and those represented on a flat surface. In this sense, what she tries is to collect the same problems that she addresses in three-dimensionality, but only altering the means of expression. In her hands, the two-dimensional work ceases to be the support of a representation or fiction to become a phenomenon of a signic nature. The series of twenty-four drawings entitled Australia (2005) -which recreate light flying constructions- show the contrasting forces in a game of tensions between the horizontal and the vertical.

    From the year 2000 she has not abandoned machines, but her work takes a turn towards nature. She then modifies the shape of the plane into anthropomorphic beings that observe the horizon and that sea that is drying up, as a premonition of the future desertification of the planet. She progressively synthesizes the artifact extremely, seeking maximum simplicity, to reach the current stage in which she is characterized by austerity, sobriety and formal purity, forming weightless architectures with a great sense of space. Variations on an elongated airplane (2022), produced in bronze painted in primary colors, affirm their horizontality as majestic current totems.

    Riera i Aragó's ability to create stories, invent and find variations on a theme or an idea seems infinite; a universe of his, highly imaginative and refined, which is even more complex to conceive taking into account the imposition of formal brevity. At times, the artist himself has misrepresented the role of his artifacts by making a flying submarine, an aquatic zeppelin or often transforming them into monsters or animals, such as the series of mosquito-planes, or submarines with a fish tail.

    Some individual exhibitions in galleries and museums include the Städtische Museen in Heilbronn and the Art Center in Berlin Friedrischstrasse (Germany); the Van Gogh Foundation in Arles (France) or the PMMK Museum vor Moderne Kunst in Oostende (Belgium). The Riera i Aragó, Aiguaforts exhibition, a selection of more than 60 etchings, was exhibited in 2012 at the headquarters of the Instituto Cervantes in various European cities. Among the best-known public works are: Buried Submarine, Hiroshima Gardens, Barcelona; Low relief, La Rambla; Municipal Building, Barcelona; Large soft submarine, Santander; Great plane with yellow, Figueres; Tired plane, Merignac (France); Najio Plane, Nishinomiya (Japan); Bas-relief of the Pompeu Fabra University, Barcelona; Ramon Llull bas-relief, Blanquerna Faculty of Communication Sciences, Barcelona; Arals, Mesen (Belgium) and Arals Turf, Roosendaal (The Netherlands).

    Author：Conxita Oliver (Spain, b. 1957)
    Conxita Oliver is a famous Spanish art historian and curator.

    【London·Mayfair】Riera i Aragó: Timeless Odyssey Debut Solo Exhibition in the United Kingdom 2025.03.20-05.18

    【London·Mayfair】Riera i Aragó: Timeless Odyssey Debut Solo Exhibition in the United Kingdom 2025.03.20-05.18

    【台北·仁愛】「天工開物—版畫與素描探考」Tiangong Kaiwu: Exploration of Prints and Drawings 2025.02.15-04.22

    【台北·仁愛】「天工開物—版畫與素描探考」Tiangong Kaiwu: Exploration of Prints and Drawings 2025.02.15-04.22

    【Taipei·DunRen】The Voyage－Riera i Aragó Solo Show 2023.6.17 – 9.10

    【Taipei·DunRen】The Voyage－Riera i Aragó Solo Show 2023.6.17 – 9.10

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