Sergi Barnils: Retrospective in Valencia and Monograph Planned for 2025

A 2025 retrospective of Sergi Barnils is scheduled for Valencia, with a possible Rome show, alongside an upcoming monograph edited by Ramon Balasch, poet and publisher from Sant Cugat del Vallés. The monograph traces Barnils's artistic development from age seven. A music-inspired project based on one of his works conceived as a score will follow. Barnils, born in Bata, Equatorial Guinea, in 1954, lives and works between Barcelona and Sant Cugat del Vallés, Spain. His family returned to Catalonia in 1956 when the Spanish colony became a province of the Gulf of Guinea. He studied at the studio of painter Nolasc Vals from 1975 and at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Barcelona from 1988. His work, shown in Spain, Germany, Austria, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Italy since 1995, employs the ancient encaustic technique—wax and fire painting of the Greeks and Romans—giving materiality to abstract compositions. Barnils's informal art blends Catalan tradition with primordial signs, and he sometimes bypasses encaustic for 'arte libre,' spontaneously throwing paint or making graphic marks. A collector recounts first encountering Barnils's work in 2001 at a Milan gallery, purchasing a large canvas that remains the centerpiece of his collection. He later met the artist in Barcelona and visited his studio in Mercantic, Sant Cugat del Vallés, and more recently in Badalona, a Barcelona suburb. Barnils's work is described as a spiritual refuge, referencing Caspar David Friedrich and Marc Chagall.