Josep Pla-Narbona was born in Barcelona, Spain in 1928. One of the most distinctive graphic artists of the twentieth century, he built an international reputation across a career that spanned fine art, illustration, and poster design — winning over one hundred international awards and exhibiting widely across Europe and the Americas. His work is rooted in the Catalan cultural tradition while reaching far beyond it, combining a mastery of graphic technique with a surrealist imagination and a sharp, sometimes unsettling wit.
Pla-Narbona’s imagery is immediately recognisable — the human body fragmented, isolated, and examined with clinical precision and dark humour. Hands, fingers, fists, eyes, and faces recur throughout his work as both formal subjects and psychological symbols, rendered with a draughtsman’s exactness and a surrealist’s appetite for the uncanny. There is always an edge to his work — something observed too closely, held too long, that tips the familiar into the strange.
His prints Fingers and Fist, (1969) were produced at Hollanders Workshop in New York, in collaboration with Fred Genis and Irwin Hollander — placing Pla-Narbona within the remarkable circle of international artists who passed through that studio during one of the most fertile periods in American printmaking. The composition showcases his signature surrealist approach — graphic line work combined with organic, hand-like structures that morph and dissolve into something between anatomy and landscape.
Josep Pla-Narbona died in Barcelona in 2020, leaving behind one of the most celebrated bodies of graphic work in the postwar Catalan tradition.
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