Solo booth by Josep Ponsatí in collaboration with the gallery Prats Nogueras Blanchard.

Josep Ponsatí (Banyoles, Girona, 1947) is renowned for his inflatables, monumental and ephemeral aerial structures. He usually built them from linked modular forms, based on the fragility and modesty of the materials and the repetitive structures of minimalism. Ponsatí erected his first inflatable in Granollers in 1971, as part of the First Exhibition of Young Art, one of the first manifestations of conceptual art in a still Francoist Catalonia. III Peça, Cap de Creus – Cadaqués – Benidorm was Ponsatí’s third large inflatable, was erected between June and August 1972; first in Cap de Creus and Cadaqués, and later, in Benidorm. The original piece was a more complex work, with red triangular modules. In its first stage in Cadaqués it rose 160 meters and in the second, in Beni- dorm, it rose nearly 300 meters. In 1977, Ponsatí raised a new inflatable in Barcelona, in the park of Montjuïc, formed by 17 white triangular modules.

Josep Ponsatí studied in Barcelona with stays in Paris and New York, and partici- pated in group actions and events of conceptualism in Catalonia in the late sixties. His first kinetic sculptures, minimalist and constructivist in character, soon drifted towards the world of the inflatable, an ephemeral sculptural object closely linked to landscape, which placed Ponsatí on the map of Conceptual art. In 1971 he built his first inflatable and from then on focused his plastic expression on the production of large inflatables. In 1973, as a result of his participation in the Paris Biennial, his infla- tables reached an international echo. Although the “launching” or staging of these aerial structures had a playful and participatory character, they were always prece- ded by a calculation and a long technical process. In the eighties and after, Ponsatí has developed aerial sculptural and ephemeral objects of greater complexity.

Recordings of his inflatables have been screened at the Paris Biennale (1973), the Fundació Joan Miró (1977), the Centre d’Art Santa Mònica in Barcelona (1989 and 1992), the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid (2005), the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Korea (2010), the MACBA (2011), the Moderna galerija in Ljubljana (2011-2012) and the CaixaForum Madrid (2011-2012). In 1986, the Museu d’Història de Girona hosted a retrospective exhibition. His work is part of the collections of the Centre Pompidou in Paris and MACBA, Barcelona.