“The masks protects us, nevertheless it additionally hides us.”
Between Languages, Cities, and Cultural Friction
Tomàs Morell Brenner’s work emerge from a life formed by cultural crossings, displacement, and shut remark of human habits. Born in Barcelona in 1964 to a German mom and Spanish-Catalan father, he grew up amongst three languages and three cultural views. Catalonia remained tangible by his father’s prolonged household, whereas his mom introduced German tradition into the family. Fairly than belonging to a single body of reference, Morell discovered early to understand the variations between social environments, a sensitivity that may change into inseparable from his method to individuals and portray.
His childhood additionally coincided with the ultimate years of Franco’s dictatorship, when Barcelona contained sharp contradictions. Political and cultural restrictions continued, but town carried a rising urge for food for social change. Morell remembers this environment of motion and expectation earlier than monetary difficulties within the household enterprise prompted his father, an engineer, to relocate the household to his mom’s hometown in Germany. The transition from Barcelona to a small, quiet German city in the course of the Nineteen Seventies profoundly altered the younger artist’s environment.
Artwork turned an vital technique of navigating that disruption. His mother and father enrolled Morell and his sister in ballet, whereas he additionally started learning music and portray. Artistic exercise provided him each independence and a type of expression for experiences he couldn’t readily put into phrases. By round fifteen, drawing and portray had change into greater than occasional pursuits. He stuffed courses with caricatures and small scenes populated by lecturers and classmates. At seventeen, largely on his personal in Germany, he utilized to the Academy of Nice Arts in Nuremberg. Acceptance reworked an intuitive attachment to portray into a proper inventive training.
Tomàs Morell: Distortion as a Language for Human Vulnerability
Morell’s work in the present day concentrates on individuals and the unstable relationships between them. Vulnerability, identification, sexuality, gender, energy, and social distinction recur all through his work, however hardly ever by literal narratives. That means as an alternative develops by bodily cues: how our bodies occupy an area, how figures confront or keep away from each other, and the way a seemingly recognizable state of affairs begins to really feel psychologically unsure. Private difficulties and trauma have additionally knowledgeable his follow, with portray functioning as a option to course of experiences that resist easy clarification.
Humor and the grotesque are essential to this course of. For Morell, humor creates sufficient distance to method troublesome materials with out turning portray into direct confession. Our bodies can change into unusual, uncomfortable, absurd, or humorous whereas retaining emotional weight. This attraction to distortion connects along with his longstanding curiosity in German Expressionism, significantly its capability to mix social criticism, harshness, humor, and psychologically charged representations of the human determine.
His inventive references span Cézanne, Picasso, Matisse, Kirchner, Grosz, and Beckmann, adopted by later pursuits in Philip Guston, Georg Baselitz, Martin Kippenberger, and the early work of Walter Dahn. The early twentieth-century avant-garde additionally offered an vital mannequin for breaking from tutorial conventions. What connects these in any other case totally different influences for Morell will not be a single aesthetic however inventive independence. He values painters who created unmistakable visible languages and demonstrated {that a} portray needn’t be lovely, agreeable, or right. Their instance inspired him to construct from his personal experiences and recurring issues relatively than reproduce an inherited model.
Masks, Fashions, and the Politics of Wanting
A decisive shift arrived in 2012, when Morell left his place as an artwork director at Saatchi & Saatchi and completely closed Blackline, the design and communications firm he had based and operated from 1996 to 2011. After years of constructing knowledgeable profession that enabled him to dwell and work in Barcelona, he selected to pay attention once more on portray. Man Holding Masks 3 (2014) and Lady Holding Masks 2 (2013) belong to this pivotal interval and helped set up the Ecce Homo sequence, later offered at Galerina Steiner in Berlin.
The sequence drew upon years of psychoanalysis and substantial private reflection. Its title invokes each the Christian picture of Christ and Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo, permitting Morell to rethink the enduring determine of the struggling human being by modern women and men. Masks turned a central system. They shield their wearers whereas concurrently concealing them, leaving the viewer unsure about what exists beneath the seen persona. His characters can resemble performers caught inside assigned roles, but their theatrical look is accompanied by disorientation. Morell painted these works in oil as a result of its materials qualities allowed him to offer our bodies an emphatic bodily presence whereas making them seem subtly distorted and unfamiliar.
Between 2017 and 2019, he returned to a different traditionally loaded picture by three diptychs based mostly on the painter and mannequin. As an alternative of merely repeating the standard association wherein a male painter observes and a girl turns into the represented object, Morell questioned the mechanics of wanting itself. The house turned more and more theatrical, virtually a stage on which viewer, painter, and mannequin might enter shifting relationships of visibility and authority. This investigation developed into Enigma y deseo and Déjà-vu. Like Ecce Homo, these works take established motifs and unsettle their anticipated meanings, asking what adjustments when acquainted photographs of masks, our bodies, artists, and fashions now not behave in keeping with conference.
Tomàs Morell: From a Pencil Mark to an Unsure Consequence
Regardless of the psychological and historic layers inside his work, Morell’s day by day follow usually begins with modest means: pencil and paper. He attracts no matter occupies his ideas with out instantly deciding whether or not the picture deserves to change into a portray. A promising drawing might stay pinned to his studio wall for days or perhaps weeks, giving him time to contemplate its potential. Steadily, it would recommend a scale, a colour relationship, or one other clue for translation into paint. Different drawings merely stay unresolved, proof of an concept that didn’t must progress additional.
This openness continues as soon as he begins portray. Morell avoids a inflexible working methodology and permits the picture to depart from its authentic premise. A seemingly clear plan can change considerably by the act of portray itself. The motion from a small drawing to a big oil portray is due to this fact not easy enlargement however a course of wherein composition, materiality, colour, and the habits of figures can redirect the work. That willingness to relinquish management corresponds along with his broader curiosity in photographs whose meanings stay unstable relatively than settling into fastened explanations.
His fast exhibition schedule brings these issues again to 2 cities central to his biography. On September 19, 2026, he is because of take part in Rojo que te cojo at Baixada 6 Initiatives in Barcelona, a gaggle exhibition centered on purple in portray and marking the opening of the brand new house. Morell values its intention to construct a connection between Berlin and Barcelona, cities which have formed his cultural references in several methods. On November 12, he’s additionally scheduled to hitch Bild der Frau at SMAC in Berlin. Devoted to girls, the exhibition intersects immediately with Morell’s persevering with consideration to our bodies, identification, illustration, and the dynamics of wanting. Past these tasks, his methodology stays intentionally open: a pencil drawing seems, stays on the wall, and generally finds its approach into paint.
