Eugenia Balcells, the artist who made the stars dance, has died.

BarcelonaEugenia Balcells, who died this Sunday at the age of 83 from cancer, said that all her work revolves around two questions: Who do we want to be? And what kind of world do we want? "These are the two essential questions for humanity at this moment. And one is absolutely linked to the other; we cannot say what kind of world we want if we cannot say who we are. And we must answer this question for all the men and women of the planet." He explained this in an interview on the ARAShe explored many avenues and, from very different perspectives and mediums, tried to provide, if not answers, at least points of reference from which to reconsider and observe them. Seen in retrospect, her work always considered the multiplicity of perspectives, whether by showcasing the stereotypes in which the media portrayed women, in pieces from the 1970s that anticipated many later reflections and critiques, or by reflecting the beauty and complexity of the universe with lights and sounds in pieces that have amazed scientists.

Balcells was born in December 1943 into a conservative and highly cultured Catalan bourgeois family. His paternal grandfather was the Modernista architect Eduard Maria Balcells Buïgas, author of the Tosquella House She was also the inventor of a series of measuring and observation tools that profoundly influenced her. On her mother's side, she came from a family of furriers from Centelles. Her great-grandmother was originally from Burma and hid her origins her entire life, but recreated the gardens of her homeland in the family home. She studied technical architecture because she wasn't allowed to study art and philosophy, which is what she wanted, and her first job was, in fact, working in her grandfather's studio. At a very young age, 21, she was in a car accident in which her mother died, leaving her bedridden for many months, unable to look at anything but the ceiling. That experience resonated throughout her work and is closely linked to her interest in vision, as a doctor friend brought her glasses with prisms that allowed her to see the people in front of her—a version of an invention her grandfather had made years before.

The American stage

In 1968, she and her husband, the doctor Juan Lorenzo, moved to the United States and spent a few years in Idaho, where she was finally able to study what she wanted at the University of Iowa, which at that time had a center for experimental art that was beginning to introduce video, then a completely marginal and inaccessible medium. Returning to Barcelona in the 1970s, she participated in the founding of Film Video Informacion (FVI) along with Manuel Huerga, Eugeni Bonet, and Juan Bofill, a group dedicated to making and disseminating experimental film and video. Arguably, her most significant work from that period was Drain (1979), a film in which a rotating, fixed camera filmed and re-filmed different moments and people passing through the room on the same negative. The editing was done inside the camera itself, so he had to write a kind of score beforehand to make the scenes coincide. An active member of the Catalan conceptual art movement, during that period he created several more performative and object-based works, such as the SupermarketAn ironic commentary on consumerism, which she presented at the Sala Vinçon in 1976 and which is now part of the MACBA collection.

In the late seventies, already divorced, she returned to the United States, this time to New York, where she encountered a vibrant art scene and came into contact with members of Fluxus, the international neo-Dadaist movement that counted John Cage and Yoko Ono among its most well-known figures. From this period, which lasted a considerable amount of time since much of her career was based in New York, come works such as From the center (1982), a version of the one that could be seen in the summer at the National Art Museum of Catalonia, which she acquired, and which shows the passage of time through twelve monitors displaying recordings from her rooftop over two years. It is also the period in which she created many works of feminist activism, such as End,Re-prise,Boy meets girl either Going through languages, which were part of the exhibition that in October 2022 It was presented at the Vila Casas Foundation. He also experimented with sound art in his works, such as Flight (1981), Indian circle (1981) or Seeing the dance (1991), all of them featuring music and sounds by Peter Van Riper, the artist and musician with whom she collaborated and with whom she was in a relationship for many years.

However, although video and moving images were a fundamental part of her work, throughout her career she used many different media, from collage to objects, including performance, installation, and object art. In 1986, for example, she created the work Liberty, a symbolic puzzle, a mural with 834 postcards of the Statue of Liberty, which is kept in the museum of this monument and which has a replica in 1991 with the work Barcelona postcard which brings together 6,318 people from the city, although it has been hidden in municipal warehouses for years.

Light and science

If the nineties were years of installations in which light, transparencies, the human body, projections and music proposed metaphorical and poetic spaces, such as They rest as if they were in their mother's house (1993), Pushing boundaries (1995), Toast (1999) or Rueda do tempo (2001) – The turn of the century brought a shift in his interests, and he turned his attention to science, exploring above all the relationship between light and sound. Thus, in works such as Tribute to the elements (2009), places the colors of light emitted by each element of the periodic table, creating a composition that is both artistic and scientific. And, in Frequencies (2009), makes these same specters dance by making the colors of the various elements collide. In another installation, UniverseIt uses images from the telescope at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory in La Palma and adds the sound that NASA has obtained by transforming the light emitted by each body into a sound equivalent.

The artist was the protagonist, in November 2022, ofa special artist diary from the ARA in which she masterfully explored how to bring her universe to the printed page. There, she demonstrated her energy, intensity, empathy, and commitment to the entire team. Balcells was a force of nature who never stopped and was curious about both the material world, from atoms to stars, and the immaterial, since spirituality and the power of the mind and intuition were present throughout her work.

A Tangible Legacy

In recent years he was working on a final work that he planned to show in Castellar de la Selva, on a 430-hectare estate that houses the headquarters of the Eugenia Balcells Foundation. He wanted to combine his love of nature—regenerating forests—his passion for science, his desire to always bring beauty to the world, his spiritual quest, and also an unusual mathematical and formal rigor. Although since 1988 he had divided his time between New York and Barcelona, ​​more than a decade ago he began preparing his return with the intention of leaving his legacy in Catalonia.

Thus, when he sold his New York studio, he invested the proceeds in this estate in Les Gavarres, which he has been renovating for the last six years. "I want it to be a meeting place, but not for just anything, or for people who come to paint or create their art. There are already millions of places to do that," explained the artist, who envisioned it as a place for encounter and reflection. "It should be a space for thinking and seeing what emerges, because the ideas, the solutions, will come from pooling the skills of people trained in different disciplines who share their knowledge, always seeking the greatest benefit, the best for the planet." The Foundation, which will also house some of his work, is now one of his main legacies.