Francesc Torres (Barcelona, 1948)

Francesc Torres was born in Barcelona in 1948. Over his extensive artistic career he has worked as a visual artist, curator and essayist for different publications and newspapers. Most of his artistic career has taken place outside of Spain: in the late 1960s he moved to Paris, where he worked with Polish sculptor Piotr Kowalski. During this period he began work on his industrial series of work. In the early 1970s he moved to the United States, first to Chicago and then to New York where he was established until 2002, with a two-year stint working in Berlin in the late 1980s.

Numerous centers and institutions of recognized standing have dedicated solo exhibitions to Francesc Torres: among others, the International Center of Photography (ICP) of New York, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia (MNCARS) of Madrid, the Museu d’Art Contemporani of Barcelona (MACBA), the Institut Valencià d’Art Modern (IVAM) of València, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the Carnegie Museum of Art of Pittsburgh, the Whitney Museum of American Art of New York, the Arizona State University Art Museum (ASU Art Museum) of Tempe, Arizona, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden of the Smithsonian Institution of Washington, D.C. and the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art of Cornell University of Ithaca, New York.
His work has also been exhibited in museums such as the Museo Guggenheim of Bilbao, Artium of Vitoria-Gasteiz, the Fundació Joan Miró of Barcelona, the Russian Museum of Saint Petersburg and the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) of New York.
In 2009 he received the National Visual Arts Prize awarded by the Government of Catalonia for the retrospective exhibition da Capo, presented at the MACBA in 2008. He was president of the Associació d’Artistes Visuals de Catalunya from 2002 to 2005 and chair of the King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center of New York University in 2006.