In his long career, Antoni Clavé was influenced by different schools and trends. In the fifties and sixties, he developed his well-known series of warriors, kings, queens and knights in a style close to Expressionism and with a foot in Surrealism. In the late sixties, however, he embraced Informalist abstraction. In the seventies and eighties, he focused on experiments in collage and the incorporation of various techniques and elements, while always retaining some figurative element. The MACBA Collection includes works from all these different periods.---Clavé’s canvases are colourful and with a marked taste for experimentation, both in terms of technique as well as form and texture. Clavé incorporates signs, circles, reliefs, drips, letters, masks and collaged paper. After 1975, he focused on the construction of backgrounds that, through trompe-l’oeil, simulate folded and superimposed paper, such as the 1987 work, D’ara i d’abans (From Now and Before). His work from the eighties typifies this approach, while he also experimented with collage and crumpled paper to which he applied aerosol spray paint. These are his papier froissé, a technique achieved by chance but which he managed to turn into a signature element. Although collages, this does not prevent them from playing with light in a clearly pictorial way. The critic Daniel Giralt-Miracle described the whole of Clavé’s work as ‘an abstraction with figurative references; a lyrical abstraction’.