City Streets
City Streets represents the remaining images from my trip to Barcelona in 2016.
Now reworked to match more closely my mystery and melancholy methodology, I hope they also capture some of the influence and sprit of the architect Antoni Gaudi and the artist Joan Miró.
Miró is said to have valued Gaud’s:
“sense of risk and improvisation, the rhythm and structure of his architecture”
Miro’s own work is often described as being influenced by both Surrealism and Dadaism, but he was not an official member of neither movement – preferring to pursue his own, unique, artistic style.
“There, in my pictures, tiny forms in huge empty spaces. Empty spaces, empty horizons, empty plains – everything which is bare has always greatly impressed me” Joan Miró
Barcelona – the capital of the Catalan region – is also inextricably linked to the Spanish Civil War. In 1938, the author George Orwell published ‘Homage to Catalonia’ a memoir of his time fighting for the Republicans against the fascist forces led by General Franco. Orwell would later say…
“Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for Democratic Socialism, as I understand it.”
By 1939, Franco’s forces had overrun Catalonia, leading to the collapse of Republican resistance and the beginning of the Franco dictatorship which, until his death in 1975, was characterised by suppression of political opposition as well as Catalan autonomy, language and culture.
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All images © W N BISHOP
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