love story, 1998

The son of a sculptor and a poetess, Antoni Abad was drawn spontaneously towards the visual arts. His earliest works, using painting and drawing, already reveal his desire to break away from the wall in their constant quest for volume. Following a timid approach with his Pintures trenades at the start of the 1980s, the shift towards sculpture took place thanks to the use of a soft and light material: foam rubber. Although that was also soon to be set aside in favour of stiffer and colder materials, such as the metallic modules used for industrial shelving, his works from this period are often coupled with photographs documenting the progressive modifications of the form or the material in the wake of the artist’s intervention, in sequence and with a certain dose of performativity. [...]