BARCELONA, SPAIN.- Nicolas de Staël is on view at the La Pedrera Exhibition hall through 24 September 2007, presents sixty works by one of the most influential painters in the development of twentieth century art. The exhibition is curated by Jean-Louis Prat, the former director of the Maeght Foundation (Saint Paul de Vence) and a foremost specialist in the work of this painter.

Linked to the Second Paris School in spite of his strong individuality, Nicolas de Staël (Saint Petersburg, 1914 - Antibes, 1955) accumulated an extensive oeuvre in only thirteen years of intense creation, in which his constant dialogue with the great masters of the past and present, in an effort to reconcile new creation with tradition, made him as one of the leading representatives of the mid-twentieth century artistic panorama, for his contribution in surmounting the abstraction-figuration polarity, which situates him at the epicentre of the plastic and aesthetic debate of the forties and fifties.

The selection of oil paintings spans the artist's dynamic career from the mid-forties, when he reaches the pinnacle of abstraction, to his later works, which seem to prophesy the tragic end of his life, to his return to figurative expression, highlighted in works such as Football Players or the landscapes of Sicily, which mark his achievement of spatial construction through colour.

The exhibition catalogue, in addition to a piece by the curator, Jean-Louis Prat, and a commented biography by Anne de Staël, the painter's daughter, includes contributions by historians and art critics such as Germain Viatte, the former director of the Pompidou Centre of Paris, Jaume Vidal Oliveras, professor of contemporary art of the Autonomous University of Barcelona, as well as input from the artists Antoni Llena and Albert Ràfols Casamada, who weigh up his decisive approach.