"Joan Rabascall (Barcelona, 1935) studied at the Escola Superior d'Arts Decoratives Massana in Barcelona and at the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts in Paris, the city where he has lived and worked since 1962. In the sixties, Rabascall came into contact with the critics Lawrence Alloway and Pierre Restany, and also with the avant-garde Independent Group in England and the new realists in France, who recovered the representation techniques and aesthetic and ethical attitudes of the Berlin Dadaists. He collaborated in the 'rituals' organised in 1969 and 1970 by a group of Catalan artists living is Paris at the time: Miralda, Benet Rossell and Jaume Xifra. While he initially began working with the medium of collage, he soon incorporated photomontage and began to combine images and objects in installations and photographic series. Rabascall's work revolves around the critique of mass media images and the lifestyle imposed by the media. Television is a recurring element in his work, and he explores it from a series of different perspectives: as icon, object, souvenir, sculpture, element of communication and fetish. In the eighties, he began a conceptual reflection around painting, and, later, around the idea of the landscape and its role in the new environmental paradigm. Although he regularly exhibited in France from the seventies onwards, aside from the odd exhibition such as Spain is Different at Galeria G in Barcelona in 1976, his work was not seen in Catalonia until 1985 when he took part in the exhibition Barcelona-Paris-New York at Palau Robert in Barcelona. He later presented projects at the Virreina (1993) and the Centre d’Art Santa Mònica (2000)." (Source, site web, MACBA)
"Born 1935 in Barcelona, Spain. Lives and works in Paris, France.
Since the mid-1960s Joan Rabascall has worked on unveiling the mechanisms behind image-making, and in particular the mass media’s manipulation of representation. After he was exiled to Paris from Francoist Spain in 1962, Rabascall met avant-garde artists of the Independent Group in London, the nouveau réalistes in Paris, theorist Lawrence Alloway and critic Pierre Restany who exhibited his works in 1966. With other Catalan artists – Jaume Xifra, Antoni Miralda and his wife Dorothée Selz – he organised a series of collective dinner performances in 1969 and 1970. His collage technique interrogates the very essence of image construction, offering a re-reading of existing images, subverting their original content and context. By reframing and associating contrasted images taken from everyday life, Rabascall turned the communication tools of mass media against themselves.
Joan Rabascall started using the technique of photomontage and photographic emulsion on canvas at the end of the 1960s, working with cut-outs from magazines, newspapers and advertising posters. Atomic Kiss 1968 is emblematic of Rabascall’s interest in reactivating the meaning of an image by means of associations with conflicted images. Responding to the bombardment of images by the mass media, Atomic Kiss superimposes an iconic, sensual and Hollywood-inspired red lipsticked female mouth with an image of an atomic explosion. An ironic and violent portrayal of the socio-political context of the upheavals in the late 1960s, this work depicts the ambiguities of American consumerist society, which hid behind its glamorous cinema icons a mass destructive military power.
Elsa Coustou
September 2015" (Source, site web, tate)