Born in 1954 and trained at the Escuela de Bellas Artes, Joan Rom had his first solo exhibition in 1983 at the Centro de Lectura de Reus, south of Barcelona, and another there in 1987. Rom’s work has been discussed principally as a site of multivalent meanings and ambiguities. Although such an analysis is valid, his work is governed less by ambiguity than by the absence of figuration.

Materials, forms, and objects are tools for Rom. He combines them with a minimum of intervention, and without emphasizing the tensions among them, thus avoiding any disjunction or decontextualization of the disparate