Josep Iglésias del Marquet (Artesa de Lleida, Segrià, 1932 – Barcelona, 1989) was a painter, art critic, visual poet and journalist. He is a key figure for understanding the emergence of concrete poetry in Catalonia, and was a pioneer of mail art during his period as a university professor in Scotland and Canada, from 1962 to 1966. After he returned to Barcelona, he promoted and participated in various collective exhibitions of experimental poetry, founding the publishing house Lo Pardal with Guillem Viladot. He was especially active in the 1970s, creating a large quantity of collages and visual poems that reflect two of his main interest areas: typography and mass communication. Both are essential for understanding the polyhedric poetics of this foundational creator, who is nevertheless unknown to the broader public.

Situated on the cusp between art, journalism and poetry, Iglésias del Marquet was an inquisitive observer of the arts and new communication systems, while also being particularly knowledgeable about graphic arts and the history of books. A declared devotee of the Chinese precursors of the printing press, Gutenberg and everything emerging from moveable type over the centuries, he was one of the first Catalan artists to include printed traces of consumer society in his works, distributing them through alternative channels. While he would never stop painting entirely, it was in experimental poetry and mail art that he found an international circuit set apart from the market, which enabled him to experiment and reflect on societal changes in the second half of the 20th century.

This exhibition explores the working methods of Iglésias del Marquet, featuring the reutilisation of both his own materials and those created by others, without establishing any differentiation between creative disciplines and his activity as a publisher and printer, or as a journalist and disseminator. In line with this, on the walls of this exhibition space various themes, techniques and periods are set alongside each other and intertwined, in an attempt to reflect a very particular array in a non-linear manner. The exhibition presents collages that have never been exhibited before, mainly from the family archive, as well as printmaking, work for other poets and indications of the terrain he delineated between text and image.