Contemporary Spanish painter Ramon Enrich (born 1968, Igualada near Barcelona) is inspired by multiple artistic fields. He harnesses his passion for architecture in his paintings of geometric and colourful landscapes. Using a grid, he creates barren spaces with a surrealistic and spellbinding feel.
Ramon Enrich is a contemporary painter who was born in Igualada near Barcelona in 1968. His knitwear-maker father's interest in the arts was a major influence on his life. In 1985, he began his formal technical education at the School of Fine Arts in Barcelona, then majored in graphic arts at Gremi d'Arts Grafiques de Catalunya, while also studying history of art at the University of Barcelona.
During his student years, the painter began involving travel in his art with university exchanges at Beaux-Arts de Paris and Berlin University of the Arts. After graduation, Ramon Enrich moved to the USA to meet his painting influences. He spent time at the Judd Foundation and the Chinati Foundation before exhibiting his work here at the start of the 1990s. He travelled on to Los Angeles, where he met Ed Ruscha and David Hockney, with whom he collaborated. He then spent a few years in New York, becoming Julian Schnabel's assistant.
For Ramon Enrich, this period was about learning how to "organise an artist's life", more from an operational viewpoint than a creative one, and also feeding his multiple sources of inspiration. On his return to Europe, he occupied a workshop in Frankfurt's Künstlerhaus Mousonturm before going home to Catalonia, where he has lived ever since.
Ramon Enrich's painting is influenced by various references and artistic fields. His typography works are abstract illustrations of poems whose letters lose their literary meaning and stand alone in the frame.
However, his architecture paintings have been the main vehicle for his distinctive aesthetic and pictorial technique. Inspired in turns by rationalist and African architectures, the artist creates landscapes of geometric shapes with a non-human reference point. Houses with flat roofs stand alongside never-ending staircases, making the architecture functionless apart from its evocatory power. The importance that Ramon Enrich gives to shapes takes his paintings to the limits of abstraction, encompassing even the vegetation in the landscape: the trees and bushes are reduced to simple cone, sphere and cube shapes just like the buildings. All these elements create a surrealistic and mysterious world burdened by an elusive light. This light accentuates various perspective effects generated by using a grid as the basis of the landscapes.
Although his rigorous-looking works would suggest otherwise, Ramon Enrich finds painting a light way to express his passion for architecture: "My true passion is architecture. (…) I've found a more frivolous outlet for it in painting, where I can create landscapes illuminated by two or three suns." Indeed, the formal strictness in Ramon Enrich's works is paradoxically accompanied by warm and bright colours that allow for a few "accidents" in the form of paint drips and rubbing, which add texture. These graphic landscapes in the blazing sun transport us to a surrealistic barren world where humans are absent and nature and architecture interact with an interplay of shapes and shadows.
Ramon Enrich has been exhibiting his works in galleries worldwide for almost 25 years.
They can be found in public museum collections (Museum Giessen, Museum Für Moderne Kunst Mittelhof, Zeitz Museum, Museu-Arxiu de Sant Andreu de Llavaneres) and the collections of prestigious companies like La Caixa, Banco Santander, NH, Fundación Telefónica and Deutsche Bank, as well as the Generali Foundation.
The artist's contemporary paintings are also acquired by various modern art collectors from all over the world. Notably, they are part of the private collections of David Hockney and Norman Foster, in addition to the Donald Judd Collection.
Ramon Enrich is a Spanish painter whose production revolves around an uncluttered, yet powerful staging of space, confronting abstraction and figuration. Such as the Minimalists, from whom he learned and got inspired by, he recreates deserted spaces...
Catalan artist Ramon Enrich has been composing mysterious landscapes from a “personal alphabet of symbols and basic shapes” and a deep sense of theatricality for more than 20 years. His paintings, often in large format, take one on a journey that is...
Cart 
