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Manel Anoro dies, a life dedicated to color and figure
The Barcelona painter, a reference for a figuration marked by light and intense colors, has died at the age of 81 while the El Claustre gallery in Girona is maintaining the exhibition that was to be presented this week as a tribute to the artist.
Barcelona painter Manel Anoro Llagostera has died at the age of 81. The news comes as the artist was preparing to inaugurate a new exhibition at the El Claustre art gallery in Girona, where his work will be on view from September 9 to 26, 2026. The presentation scheduled for this week will ultimately be held as an act of tribute to his career, although the gallery has decided to suspend the cocktail party and the drawing of paintings that were planned for the inauguration.
Anoro built a recognizable pictorial universe throughout his career, linked to a figuration of strong chromatic intensity and with a clear Fauvist influence. Landscapes, urban scenes, nature and female nudes occupied a large part of his production, always through a painting in which color assumed a leading role. The light and atmospheres of his travels through the Caribbean left a particularly visible mark on his work, with seascapes, warm tones and a way of looking far from strictly descriptive realism.
But his imagination also found roots in the nearest landscape. Girona, Cadaqués, Foixà, the Priorat and, especially, Menorca became recurring settings for his painting. The island occupied a unique place in his career and also in his life, to the point that he set up his second workshop there. Through these territories, Anoro developed a painting interested both in what it represented and in the capacity of the brushstroke and color to transmit a certain emotion.
His work often started from an apparently simple view of the landscape or the figure, but incorporated an expressive will that allowed him to move away from mere representation. The brushstroke, the treatment of light and the chromatic contrasts contributed to constructing scenes in which reality became the starting point for exploring sensations and atmospheres.
The El Claustre gallery highlights precisely this capacity for discovery that characterized Anoro's painting. In his works, they explain, there always appears "a corner of the landscape, a detail of a figure that, without knowing exactly why, will catch our attention". A quality that, according to the gallery, made each painting "a surprise of emotions", capable of challenging the viewer from the first glance.
The exhibition now presented by El Claustre acquires, after his death, an unexpected dimension. The works that Anoro had prepared to reunite with the public in Girona can be seen as a final approach to his pictorial universe: one in which landscape, figure and light coexisted under an intense palette and a deeply personal gaze.
The exhibition will thus allow us to recover a trajectory built over decades around an idea of painting understood as a visual and emotional experience. In Manel Anoro's work, color was not only a descriptive tool, but a way of approaching the world. Now, this exhibition, planned as a new encounter with his painting, is also transformed into a farewell.
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