NÚRIA L.RIBALTA Barcelona - 1957
I work and I love enamelling with fire on metals over other ways of art expression because of their excellent possibilities, immutability and big versatility, which this technique offers me.
I always have tried to mantain a depurated technique (execution) in benefit to (serving to/ servant to) the creativity, sharing (combinning) traditional techniques with the most modern products and new techniques as industrial enamelling, silkscreen or transfers like "collage" and adding the recent vitrificable materials as lusters, water colors, crayons or acrilic pigments... posible to use for firing at high temperatures.
My work of art is divers. I was interested in the simbolism and in the world of dreams, the erotism, the surrealistic objects, the visual poetry and recently, perhaps due to the influence of my long period dedicated to the study and investigation for doctorl thesis, I'm working on historical references.
I´m inspired too by nature and many natural elements (leafs, grass, trees...) appear in my works.
I work with very simple formal structures, on steel plates coated with industrial enamel and using glass filaments and silver and gold foil very often in my compositions.
I have also recently created a collection of objects on enamelled copper with jewellry enamel and decorated only with the effects of gold and silver foil on top, fused at high temperature.
I saw many new options to continue looking for.

"Autoretrat."
(17 x 12 cms). Barcelona, 1999
Esmalt pintat sobre coure.
Grisalla

"Paisatge Mediterrani VIII"
(O 16 cms) Barcelona, 1999
Plat amb bisell d'argent.
Esmalt pintat sobre coure amb
pallons d'or i argent.

"Raó i sensibilitat III"
(30 x 30 cms.). Barcelona, 2000
Esmalt pintat sobre acer.
Tècnica mixta.

"Arts del foc."
(O 12 cms). Barcelona, 2001
Esmalt pintat sobre coure.
Collage amb CD.

"III Mil·lenni".
Serie: Autopistes de la informació.
(O 12 cms). Barcelona, 2001
Esmalt pintat sobre coure.
Collage amb CD.

"Comb"
(11,3 x 5 cms) double sided
Painted enamel on copper
(Silver and gold foil)

Award: 2004 "The New Idea for Integration Materials Award.- 17 International Cloisonné Jewelry Contest.
The Japan Shippo Conference.
Ginza La Pola Gallery Tòkyo and Syosenkyo Rope-Way Cloison Art Museum. (Japan)

The Art of Enamelling has old roots in Catalonia, in the northeast of Spain and Barcelona has a very well known enamelists and for their characteistics they are known as "Shool of Barcelona", since the beginning of our century.
During the Art Nouveau period, Barcelona was an important center of creativity in all crafts and was a very good moment for enamel art with "plique-a-jour" jewellery makers etc... The enamel tradition has continued during all the century located in town with art schools teaching it.
Catalan enamel has achieved high quality during the fifties and sixties, in classical personal style .

Among the young generation of enamellers in Spain, N£ria L. Ribalta is one of the more active peaple participating in many international exhibitions and beeing part of art organisations, founder member of the CIDAE (Association of Enamellers in Spain, located in BarcelonA) in 1983, and enamelling teacher of the Arts and Crafts School (called LLOTJA) in Barcelona, together with her teacher Mr. Andreu Vilas¡s, since 1978.
On 1996 she has presented the Doctoral Thesis on Fine Arts, about enamel art of XIX- XX centuries in Europe on the barcelona University.

She has obviously contributed to the renovation of enamel art.
Nowadays she is working on a synthesis, giving more importance to the mental concept of artwork. She combine figurative (realistic) representations in relation with art history with informalism and gestual expressions.
She has had an accadenic training in a strict traditional technique, but she has been able to evolute and broke with the tradition, but always with good (right) technique and has developped a new open possibilities of way of expression with enamel material. Always technique servant to the mental concept.

"You can see in the enamels of N£ria L. Ribalta that the best of an image is also present in their decomposition, and the sensibility of the artist is very clear (evident) in the work of precise (minute) chromatic disestructuration of old images, coming from ancient usances of enamels " (A.Puig).

Recently incorporing the transfers, images manipulated, cutted... acchieving a new significant and a new concept for the use of them.
Using also the glass filaments and the silver and gold foil in a personal way is building a gestual expression, spontaneous, dinamic and fresh, very contemporary, not easy to find in enamel art.

"Núria L. Ribalta resume in their pieces part of the history of this art millenary, thanks to the curious confrontations of rococo classicism with the most strict contemporarity, in an opportunely synthesis of language." (R. Medina).

Fax: 934 357 858
E-mail: focgal@suport.org

CIDAE, Centre d´Informació i Difusió de l´Art de l´Esmalt