Joan Rabascall
born in Barcelona, Spain in 1935, lives in Paris, France
Hommaga to the Black Power, 1969/70
object
MoCA Skopje
Joan Rabascall is a conceptual artist focused on the critical examination of mass media and the consumerist culture they promote. He was born in Barcelona and moved to Paris in 1962. Joan Rabascall’s artworks often combine found photography with images from magazines, television, and advertisements to achieve ironic shifts in meaning and offer social criticism and political commentary.
Along with fellow artists Antoni Miralda, Dorothee Selz and Jaume Xifra, Joan Rabascall worked in a collective inspired by the countercultural movements of the mid-twentieth century. Between 1969 and 1976, the group created a series of participatory performances and events. “Homage to Black Power” is a sculpture that represents the enormous, flattened form of a raised black fist holding delicate red flowers. As an anti-fascist white European artist, exiled to Paris from Franco’s Spain, Joan Rabascall expressed solidarity with the civil rights movement in the US. Today, one might legitimately question the appropriation of this symbol by a white artist, but we include it here as an image of another social and political moment in a specific time period. The first version of this work was installed in the gardens of the American Center in Paris in 1969.
The work was donated to the MoCA Skopje in 1970/1971.