A lifelong passion for cork is expressed in Joaquim Vicens Gironella’s finely carved works. Employing the skills he used as a cork artisan, including debarking, cutting, and polishing, he made intricate bas-reliefs, large three-dimensional objects, and prints from carved cork. Themes of good and evil emerge from these sculpted surfaces, in which he often left the porous textures exposed as he was inspired by the individual qualities of each piece of cork. The Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve, devilish horned beings, and dragons recur in his compositions, in which flora, fauna, and human figures entwine in the contours of the shaped material. Proudly Catalan, he borrowed imagery from the literature, folklore, and popular culture of Catalonia, as well as from Islamic and medieval art.
Gironella was born in 1911 in Agullana in Girona, a region known for its cork oak trees and cork production, particularly for wine stoppers. Raised in a family of cork makers, he learned early on the value and beauty of this local resource. He was an avid writer of poems, plays, and novels throughout his life, even making an entire book out of cork in 1990. Called Exaltatió del suro (Exaltation of Cork), it features poems in Catalan and illustrations. During the Spanish Civil War, he was involved with the anti-fascist Republican Army and edited a publication for its fighters. Following Franco’s victory in 1939, he fled the country. He spent time in a French concentration camp and then worked at a cork factory in Toulouse. He began carving cork into sculptural reliefs sometime between 1941 and 1946.
In 1948, Gironella caught the attention of the artist and collector Jean Dubuffet after his factory boss displayed his works in his Paris office. (Dubuffet worked as a wine merchant for his family business before committing permanently to his art practice in the 1940s.) Gironella’s carvings were subsequently included in exhibitions at the Foyer de l’Art Brut, although he would state that he felt the art brut label did not fit his work. He died in 1997.
Allison C. Meier, 2025
Text written as part of “Rethinking Biography,” an initiative supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS).
