Next Age Gallery

CARLES SAPENA I GRAU

Carles Sapena i Grau was born in Barcelona in 1959.
He starts painting in the middle of the 70’s.
Studied at the University of Barcelona between 1978 and 1983 in the faculties of Fine Arts, Medicine and Psychology.

He began his career as a painter, engraver and illustrator in 1981 at the Sala Amagatotis, piloted by Lluis Antón Mainé and under the guidance of the writer and critic Juliá Guillamon. Between that year and the mid-2000s he made more than 30 exhibitions, many of them thematic in Spain, Switzerland, Cuba, Italy, United States and Portugal (see detail) and trained as an engraver in the workshops of Victor Ramirez, Maria Assumpció Raventós and Rosa Siré, being a pioneer in the techniques of engraving on methacrylate.

At the end of the decade, he established his residence in Havana, Cuba, where, sponsored by the photographer Alberto Korda – the great chronicler of the Cuban revolution – he held several exhibitions.
During the following years he travels incessantly around the Caribbean basin and lives successively between Barcelona and Havana. In 1999 he left the island for good and moved to Miami, Florida.

Between 2005 and 2010 he studied digital graphic techniques (his first pioneering work in this field dates back to 1986).
In 2010, after a fruitful and revealing stay in Brazil, he began to integrate fractal mathematics into his work, developing his techniques in digital and physical media and forging a syncretic style between surrealism, abstraction and fractal mathematics.

In 2013 he takes up residence on the island of Fuerteventura where he will live for three years integrating the desert and volcanic landscape of the island of the wind to his fractal technique.
In early 2016 he moved to the island of El Hierro where he currently resides and where he incorporates giclée, sculpture and photography to his techniques.