Marta Palau, the forgotten artist of the Catalan republican exile, returns home

She is one of the most innovative artists born in Catalonia in her artistic practices and who most challenge our contemporaneity and, nevertheless, except for the exhibition at La Lonja de Zaragoza (2014) and the Morera Museum (2015), her work has not received the recognition it deserves until today, when the Tàpies Museum, starting on February 27, will put an end to the long "exile" of Marta Palau (Albesa 1934-Mexico City 2022).

"My mother arrived in Mexico in 1940 at the age of six with nothing and without knowing how to speak Spanish," says the artist's daughter, Marta Gassol, in good Catalan from Tijuana. "My grandfather Francesc," she continues, "had studied in Salamanca during the time of Unamuno, was a doctor and councilor of the CNT assigned to a hospital in Terrassa, and, at the end of the Civil War, was able to flee the labor camps in Spain and France before obtaining passage to America and, after a short time, claiming his family. Needless to say, their lives were in mortal danger in Albesa."

Marta Palau i la seva germana Teresa, en el moment del seu exili.

On January 8, 1940, thanks to the help of the Junta de Ayuda a los Republicanos Españoles (JARE) and the hundred dollars sent by Francesc Palau, Antònia Bosch and her two daughters, Marta and Teresa, embarked in Lisbon on the Italian ship Vulcania bound for New York. "From there," says Marta Gassol, "they had to make the journey by road to Nuevo Laredo. Republican solidarity, especially from an exiled friend from Madrid, and the Government of Lázaro Cárdenas, helped them start a new life in Mexico with tomato or cotton crops and the profession of doctor. "My mother married Albert, a doctor, like my maternal grandfather, and son of Ventura Gassol. The one who was a councilor of the Generalitat lived in Switzerland and was an excellent person and felt proud to have been the first Minister of Culture in the world and to have saved so many people during the war."

Marta Gassol remembers that, once they settled in Tijuana, her maternal grandfather, with the memory of the Civil War still vivid, joked about the convenience of living on the border “for whatever might come”. “Tijuana,” she continues, “reminded them of their homeland. The Mediterranean climate, the mountains, the sea, the vineyards”. Being born among farmers and being the daughter of the Republican exile marked her mother. She experienced exile as a wound, but also as a source of creation that prompted her to look to her Catalan and Mexican roots for a way of resistance.

Marta Palau i Ventura Gassol.

Marta Gassol portrays her mother as a tireless worker who practiced all modes of art, engraving, painting, sculpture, ceramics, installation or tapestry. In Mexico she studied painting with another exiled artist, Bartolí, and in the sixties, tapestry with Josep Grau Garriga in Barcelona. Palau was one of the most relevant artists in contemporary Mexico, both for her technical innovation and for the symbolic depth of her work. Her art, deeply linked to natural materials, such as branches, henequen, corn leaves, jute, ixtle, roots, clay, cork or glass, refers to a magical and ritual dimension that dialogues with indigenous cosmovisions. But his discourse goes beyond aesthetics: in his installations and sculptures there is an incisive criticism of borders as a symbol of repression, a defense of migration and an acute analysis of the violence exerted on bodies, especially female bodies.

Palau challenged the patriarchal canons of art and dared to represent female sexual desire (The Waterfall, which can evoke a gigantic cascade of sperm and the creation of life) in an era and cultural context where these topics were taboo. His work invites us to reflect on migrants seeking a better future in the United States. The experience of exile allowed him to deeply empathize with the experiences of those who flee their countries of origin due to violence, poverty or persecution. In this sense, his work not only reflects on the past, but also directly addresses the present. "If in prehistory the migratory waves were from North to South, now they follow the opposite path," says his daughter.

Marta Palau, Doble Muro, 2006.

Trump’s policies, which intensify mass deportation and encourage the criminalization of migrants and hate speech, resonate like a dark echo in Palau’s artistic practice. His pieces invite us to reconsider the border not as a limit, but as a space of interaction and transformation. Borders not only divide, but are also spaces where struggles for dignity and human rights are fought.

Marta Gassol, who is a gynecologist in Tijuana, highlights an immense burlap vagina, titled Ilerda, a nod to her mother's birthplace and the fertilizing power of nature. Or the installation Doble Mur, seven rows of dry branches, simulating a precarious staircase, the fragile steps barely joined, around the silhouette of a person lying on the ground, like the chalk silhouettes drawn by the police. "It is," says Marta Gassol, "a reminder of the migrant who died on the border, a farmer whose only land is the one that covers his petate and that when he dies they bury him with him." Stairs, at the same time, can serve to overcome physical and political barriers or access a higher state of consciousness. "She," says her daughter, "not only created works, but universes, fabrics of symbols that connected human stories with the land, cultural roots and the spiritual."

Marta Palau, Ambientanción alquímica, 1970. Museo Amparo

At the same time, Marta Palau explores the transformative dimension of manual labor, forgotten by industrial societies, and reclaims textile techniques and natural materials to recover the dignity of jobs traditionally associated with women, such as weaving, knotting or embroidery. The artist approaches the representation of women as a symbol of telluric force and ancestral connection with nature and the cosmos: women as naualli (witch or sorceress), as creators, as transformative and metamorphic powers, women who weave threads as fibers of life. "She said she was a naualli, the powerful, magical, creative hand, caretaker of the tribe, shamanic"; that is, art as a mediator between the material and the spiritual and a space of resistance", emphasizes his daughter, who will be present at the inauguration of the exhibition My paths are terrestrial, curated by Imma Prieto, director of the Tàpies Museum, with the collaboration of the University Museum of Contemporary Art of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (MUAC).

Marta Palau, Ilerda V, 1973. MUAC