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Marta Palau Bosch (Alabesa, Lleida, Spain) it's a Spanish artist exiled to Mexico in 1940. She's well known as an artist for working with tapestry, in fact she was one of the pioneer artists to use this technique in Mexico. She was the coordinator of Centro de Arte Moderno de Guadalajara, and the creator of the International Salon of Standards among other important artistic events.

Nowadays Marta lives between Mexico City and Tijuana, Baja California, living next to the border with US help her to realize how unfair is the situation for all the Mexicans that tries to cross it trying to find a better future. In the interview Cristina Pachecho, made in 2013 Marta says:

"'The border between Mexico and US had been lately built bigger, now there are two fences, the new one, it’s actually electrified, and it enters into the sea, they (the American government) try to divide the ocean in two, just for not letting the people enter. How crazy is that! It really irritates me! I use my art to denounce the US immigration policies'."

Early live and artistic studies
Marta Palau was born in Alabesain 1934. Marta and their family were forced to move to Mexico in 1940 when she was only six years old, due to the Spanish civil war. During the first years in Mexico she studied in La Escuela Madrid, created by Lazaro Cardenas an important character in Marta’s life and also in all of the people who were forced to exile to Mexico. She began her art studies in 1955 at the Escuela de Artes Plasticas, La Esmeralda, in Mexico City. Later on she studied at La Escuela de pintura y escultura del Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes, (INBA) in Ciudad de Mexico. On her first period on studies it’s important the influence of Guillermo Salva Santamaría when he was her pupil on la Ciudadela, México D.F., and later on of ]]Josep Bartolí i Guiu]].

Before finishing her studies, she moved to US to study San Diego State Univeristy, with Paul Lingren, and finally she returned to Barcelona for a while to study tapestry with Josep Grau Garriga.

Techniques and materials
Marta Palau it’s polyhedral, pioneer and unclassifiable as an artist. Palau has dabbled in the different artistic technics: painting, engraving, silkscreen, sculpture and installations, she’s well known for using non common materials such as: vegetables fibers, wood, clay, mud… She said about this topic: "In my in my installations I basically use very poor elements, such as natural fibers, paper a mate and mud... Really, I've dedicated myself to work with very simple elements. For example, the last stage of textiles that I worked on was made with Mexican fibers, like corn leaves, reeds and a quencher…"

Her long career in textile art has made her the artist most relevant of Mexico in the area of volumetric carpet, the object and the textile setting. As impossible, it’s making a list of materials that Palau used, it’s impossible to classify her art into only one movement, but she had been working with abstract expression, land art, arte povera, trash art.

Paintings
At the begging of Marta Palau career, she mainly worked with paintings, Palau’s first important exhibition was in El Salón Independiente de 1968 also known as SI, in 1968, it was an art exhibition created against all Salón Solar. The Salon Solar was an organized by the government during the Olympic Games in Mexico.

During 1968 many student mobilizations were broke up because they were against the celebration of the Olympic games. When the government decided to organize this parallel exhibition of art an amount of painters refused to be part of participate it; and they created this independent exhibition charged with critical thinking against the Mexican government. The SI was celebrated once a year from 1968 until the dissolution in 1971.

For Marta Palau those exhibitions were the first time that she presented their art pieces, she had been working with paintings until 1972 when she started working with tapestries, textile and sculptures materials and techniques that will make her the great and famous that she is nowadays.

Textile and tapestries
Marta Palau started to work with textile art in 1972, this new interest went hand to hand when she moved to Tijuana. In this northern of city of Mexico, the cultural activity was almost nothing. When she was living there she felt attracted with the textile arts worked by American artists specially by Sheila Hicks. After knowing their art Marta decided to install a loom in her workshop. Marta Palau’s firsts textile art pieces were made using serape technique, but the lines, the regularity and the absence of relief makes not very seductive this technique.

Marta Palau decided to made a trip during 1972 to Catalonia, this trip was the first contact with their origins after the exile of their family to Mexico. When she was in Catalonia she met with the artist Josep Grau Garriga, this contact were very prolific because she returned to their origins and she learn from Grau Garriga.

The first important exhibition of tapestry by Palau was celebrated in 1972 in Centro de Arte Moderno de Guadalajara, Jalisco. Marta Palau shown their own creative language so accurate to their personalty and art.

During that exhibition she said: “Art, it’s an intuition. It’s a magic ritual whose last result it is the important. The artists it’s not important at all.”

Irregular tapestries made from wool, jute, cotton… And added to those art pieces: cork, wood, glass or metallic pieces. The influence by Grau Garriga and the catalan art was obvious, since that point Marta started created their own language: brutality and refinement mixed together to create beautiful and smart objects.

On December 1973, in her second exhibition in El centro de Arte Moderno de Guadalajara, Marta created important art pieces and shown that she was improving faster and audacity in her career as textile artist. For the first time their objects were hanged on the wall, others were hooked on the roof like Calder’s art pieces. There were some smooth sculptures or manufactured objects. The biggest tapestries were hanged on the roof, slipped on walls and finished on the floor. Their art pieces were made from second-hand objects, unusual and rare materials, characteristics that since that point became basic in their artistic language.

During the next ten years their art was shown in a lot of museums and also she worked for the National Ballet of Mexico creating their scenery.

When the Palacio de Bellas Artes decided to create an exhibition during summer of 1985, Palau decided to create explicit Mexican art pieces, she decided to skip using any rare element and use the material as something defining of itself.

Paraphrasing Guinovart, she called the exhibition: Mis caminos son terrestres. The pieces created by Palau in this exhibition didn’t treat her live, instead of that, she tried to treat only pure mexican topics: the culture of corn, the compact and heavy sculptures created by the precolonial natives, the light and their realtion with the Maya architecture and the culture of those native civilizations.

After this exhibition Marta Palau became one of the most important contemporary artist in Mexico, still today it’s considered the best tapestry artist in her country. She created her own artistic language and still today her art creates a lot of interest. Palau’s tapestries are related with feminism, although this artist has not made explicit a feminist position, in the various interpretations that have been made about his work, those that link to a preoccupation with female body, identity and power stand out. For the art historian Renato González Mello, for example, the entire production of Marta Palau can be read as a vindication of female desire. Her textile and tapestry art had become unmistakable and there is no doubt that still today we can consider Marta Palau one of the pioneer and the best artist in Mexican contemporary art.

Scuplture
Her sculpture emerges as a parallel expression to the moment in which she completely devotes herself to tapestry, and although it is not an area which has been thoroughly explored, it is necessary to make one or two remarks on how she sees and understands volume and space, and its differences in this respect from textiles.

The first thing that springs into view when one confronts Marta Palau’s sculptures is that they are the exact opposite of how much she has achieved in fine art. Her work generally speaking, is exuberant, complex, a mixture of materials and techniques, and an obsession with constant invention of different methods of emphasizing texture.

Sculpture is the ascetic part of her nature in which she controls simple elements and purifies symbols. Because of her large scale projects she has developed many of her sculptural ideas with models. Consequently she has been influences by the notable urban sculpture movement which has been developing in Mexico.

She is particularly enthusiastic about the idea of labyrinths witch she has expressed in tubular constructions. Another recurrent theme is the so-called doors of time built from the points of view of their form, on the base of a simplification of abstract symbolism recurring in her work. These same symbols are interpreted in different ways: she introduces in them a minimalist sensitivity, she reduces the forms to their simplest expression until she is left with a few lines modeled by the space.

Just as in painting and tapestry she makes colors and shapes clash, in sculptures she tries not to attempt too much but to express the possibilities of the basic shapes where space plays a fundamental role. Her usually complex works sometimes seem to be contradicted by simple elements, by calligraphy reminiscent of ancient alphabets; from this stems her gracefulness and feeling.

International salon of standards
In 1996 Alfredo Álvarez Cárdenas, director of Centro Cultural Tijuana CECUT, proposed Marta to organize the first International Salon of Standards. As Marta said:  “organizing this salon in a city like Tijuana, it’s dangerous and privileged” .

Palau considered a lot about what she wanted to propose, she thought that the standards are: emblems, banners, banners, flags, shields, protection... Finally she decided to invite artists from all around America: South America, Central America, the Caribbean and North America; with this international salon Palau pretended to gave the opportunity to the people from Baja California to known another ways of representation, artists and art in general and at the same time, she wanted to open new artistic spaces.

And somehow she got her goal, because the International Salon of Standard was celebrated for three times: ES 96, ES 97, ES 98; and lately it became an international Biennal : ES 2000, ES 2002, ES 2004 and ES 2006.

Feminism
Although this artist has not made explicit a feminist position, in the various interpretations that have been made about his work, it’s obius that one of the preoccupation of Palau it’s the interpretation with female body and it’s identity and power.

For the art historian Renato González Mello, for example, the entire production of Marta Palau can be read as a vindication of female desire. Palau’s works around the Naualli, the female figure of the shaman, are characterized by vaginal clefts and vulva forms that serve as symbols of the magic and healing powers of the warrior, the witch or the priestess.

The materials used in this set of works, plant fibers, leaves and dry branches have been interpreted as a bond with the natural and the sacred. For González Mello, in the Shamanes enclosure (which in the words of the artist "is like a large vagina that represents fertility") the relationship between "outside and inside" is problematic, disrupting and disturbing the viewer, as in his Atmosphere Alchemy - which by the way contains symbols referring to the masculine and the feminine. In that dispute a structure with a particular "inside" bursts in the architectural space of the museum and raises a family, inner nature, different from the threatening nature that opposes masculine reason.

Exhibitions

 * ''2014. Tránsitos de Naualli, La Lonja de Zaragoza, España.
 * ''2012. Tránsitos de Naualli, Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes, México.
 * ''2008. Homenaje a Emilio Carballido, Galería Ramón Alva de la Canal, Universidad Veracruzana.
 * ''2006. Doble muro, instalación, Sala Arte Publico Siqueiros, INBA.
 * ''2005. Hunting Season. Front-era, Canal 12 Televisa, Tijuana.
 * ''2004. Front-era / triángulo. Lo uno y lo múltiple/Todas las guerras, Museum of Contemporary Art, La Jolla, San Diego.
 * ''2003. Lo uno y lo múltiple, Salas Hermenegildo Bustos y Polivalente, Universidad de Guanajuato. Todas las guerras, 3 instalaciones, Fisher Gallery, USC, Los Ángeles.
 * ''2002. Universitat de Lleida, Aula Magna, Sala Victor Siurana.
 * ''2001. Los que quedan -muro transitable-, Museo de las Californias, CECUT, Tijuana.
 * ''1999. Kunsthaus Santa Fe, San Miguel de Allende. Centro Cultural MEC, Montevideo.
 * ''1998. Nómadas II, Centro Cultural, Tijuana.
 * ''1993. Galería Arte Mexicano, México, D.F.
 * ''1991. Instalación, Fisher Gallery, Los Ángeles.
 * ''1985. Mis caminos son terrestres, Sala Nacional, Palacio de Bellas Artes, México, D.F.´
 * ''1978. Museo de Arte Moderno, México, D.F.

Artistic awards

 * ''2010. Premio Nacional de Ciencias y Artes de México, Bellas Artes.
 * ''2008. Orden de la Independencia Cultural Rubén Darío, República de Nicaragua.
 * ''2003. Creador Artístico, Sistema Nacional de Creadores, México, D.F.
 * ''2002. Doctorat Honoris Causa al Exilí Catalá, Universitat de Lleida.
 * ''2001. Bienal de Estandartes 2000, premio Cultura 2000, IMAC, sección Artes Plásticas, Tijuana, Baja California.
 * ''1999. Mención de Honor, Omnilife, Guadalajara, México.
 * ''1997. Creador Artístico, Sistema Nacional de Creadores, México.
 * ''1993. Creador Artístico, Sistema Nacional de Creadores, México.
 * ''1992. Burgerpreis (premio del público), Trienal de Fellbach, Alemania.
 * ''1986. Primer Premio, instalación Bastones de Mando, 2ª Bienal de La Habana.