Barcelona, Spain, 1948
Lives and works between Barcelona, Spain and New York, USA
Known as a pioneer of installation art in the 1970’s, Francesc Torres has created work over the past four decades that has ranged from his early, conceptually-structured and poetically-oriented sculptural installations to his more recent extensive research-driven projects that explore themes of memory, power, politics and history.
Torres’s aesthetic strategies are varied, complex and shifting. Formats utilized by Torres include photography, essays, exhibition curating, film, language-based work, appropriation and interventions in public space. He frequently employs objects — whether artistic or vernacular — as cultural artifacts, incorporating them into installations where their historical charge is exposed while their poetic potential is allowed to emerge.
Throughout his practice, Torres parses images, objects and texts — the photographic index, the signifying object, the written word — as a means to decipher concealed or camouflaged ideological codes. As a result, Torres conceives of his artistic practice as a form of critical intervention into history and a means of exploring overlapping spheres of political discourse, cultural heritage, collective thought and social action.
