Francesc Torres (Barcelona, 1948) began his career studying graphics at the Massana School in Barcelona.

In 1967 he decided to go to Paris, where he would live until 1969. During his stay in the French capital he worked as an assistant to renowned artists such as Piotr Kowalski with whom, in the artist’s words, he “learned to think”.

After this period he moved to the United States (1972) to reside first in Chicago – there he will participate, among other exhibitions, in a collective at the Museum of Contemporary Art of the city and will celebrate his first solo – and, later (1974), in New York, where he has established his residence. And at the end of the eighties she worked in Berlin for two years. This factor, determining for the construction of his discourse, explains that his work has been very little disseminated in our country, despite his continuous participation in cultural life as an essayist and columnist in newspapers and magazines.

A pioneer of the language of installation, Francesc critically reflects on the various manifestations of culture, politics, memory and power through his multimedia installations, which give him a unique place in the art of recent decades. Torres’s work is essential to reveal a kind of continuity of avant-garde practices in the eighties and nineties, an aspect that has often been questioned by the media, institutions and the market. If in the sixties, avant-garde practices formulated the first examples of institutional criticism and in the eighties the artists chose to make works for the museum as a means of escaping the pressures and conditioning of the market, their work, on the other hand, was He has situated between those two positions.

On the one hand, Torres has used the space of cultural institutions as support and a means to convey the analysis of the links between ideology, power and submission. On the other hand, his work makes explicit a statement about the artist’s position vis-à-vis society: the relationship between the individual and the community, the role of political discourse regarding social action and the set of received beliefs that make up a determined collective thought. To do this, Torres recovers the most effective techniques invented at the beginning of the 20th century and perfected by avant-garde artists, such as John Heartfield and Josep Renau, or beyond, by Francisco de Goya and Honoré Daumier. The artist not only represents the reality that surrounds him, but sets out to change it.