Click here to read the Spanish version.
Ignasi Monreal is a multidisciplinary Barcelona artist, highly appreciated in the world of high fashion, who has also made an impact on the creative scene with his series of ‘dirty dishes’ or ‘after-dinner’ series in which he explores the intersection between gastronomy and art.
From digitally painting pieces that evoked Renaissance masterpieces, she went on to become part of the fashion community, collaborating with emblematic firms such as Gucci, Dior, Louis Vuitton and JW Anderson. That virtuality would somehow relegate her to the background then to move on to create series of photorealistic paintings of plates, which she exhibited in 2019 in her first solo exhibition entitled ‘Plat Brut’ at the Fresh Gallery.
Monreal’s hyperrealist banquet is constructed through the art of painting the table as a creative obsession that he has been exploring for some time now; and which he tackles in his collection of dirty plates with leftover food, traced on the basis of a realistic costumbrismo that gives rise to the viewer’s confusion; without knowing whether it is something real or a simulation of an artistic product in oil.
In his creative still life he has also served other types of collaborations, such as the one that artistically reinterpreted a liquid emblem: Ruinart champagne, with whom he has collaborated on two occasions. The latter as a limited edition of hand-painted bottles that were exhibited exclusively at ARCO Madrid 2023.
The entire composition thus reveals his own interpretation of the realist movement together with influences of the Italian and Spanish Baroque, with which he configures great feasts inspired by nocturnal dinners, luxurious parties or genre scenes suspended between beauty and the pleasure of sitting at the table.
