Vallvidrera · Garcés · De Seta · Bonet, 2013

The studio

A room twelve metres by thirteen and a half, without a single window, lit by one opening cut where the four sloping planes of the roof meet. Eduard Arranz-Bravo’s late work was made beneath it, under this light and no other.

The building

Place: Vallvidrera, on the slope of Tibidabo
Architects: Garcés · De Seta · Bonet Arquitectes
Completed: 2013
Levels: Two. Painting above, sculpture and storage below
Painting room: 12 × 13,5 m
Light: From above, through a single skylight

Two buildings, not one

In the same place in Vallvidrera there are two things that must not be confused. The house-studio, where he lived and worked from 1991. And this free-standing building, completed in 2013, which is the one in these photographs. They are two properties on the same site and two different ways of working.

You reach it by a stone path, between holm oaks and pines. The building does not announce itself: it is a compact volume with a folded roof, and the fold is the first thing you see of it.

An uneven stone path climbing through vegetation to the entrance of the studio. The volume of the building shows its roof folded into sloping planes. To the left of the path, two bronze sculptures on white pedestals; to the right of the entrance, a full-height glazed opening. — Arriving at the studio. The folded roof is seen from outside before it is seen from within.

The painting room

Upstairs there is not a single window. All four walls are exposed concrete from floor to ceiling, and the only opening is overhead. The architects call them espacios severos y desnudos al servicio del trabajo artístico, and explain this as an answer to a solitary, introspective practice.

What comes of it is a light with no direction and no time of day: it falls from above, the same everywhere, and there is nothing to look at that is not the painting.

Wide view of the painting room. The sloping planes of the ceiling converge along a ridge. On the concrete walls, large-format work hangs and leans: a pale canvas with a figure with a green head and red arms, a yellow one, an ochre one with a single eye, a white one with a circle, and a red triptych. A white-haired person walks towards the back with their hands behind them. — The painting room, 12 × 13.5 metres. The light comes only from the ceiling.

The painting room, 2019. Video by the studio team.

Someone painting, leaning forward at a large canvas of grey and blue covered with interlocking figures, an empty white quadrilateral at its centre. In front, a work table full of jars of brushes, tins and papers. — At the centre of the canvas, a white quadrilateral still unpainted.

Corner of the painting room with two old wooden easels each holding a canvas: one blue and yellow with a black handprint, and one salmon-coloured with a black circle. On the floor and against the wall, more finished canvases and an empty white panel. — The two wooden easels, against the concrete.

The architects wrote «severe and bare», and so it is. What the family put inside, on the other hand, is a bentwood rocking chair and a canvas folding chair. The room is severe; what happens in it is not.

Corner of the painting room with a bentwood rocking chair with a cane seat in the foreground. Behind it, canvases stacked against the concrete wall, two vertical orange paintings, a red one with a mechanical figure and a dark one with a yellow and black figure. Along the base of the wall, small works lined up. — A bentwood rocking chair in the middle of a concrete room.

The skylight

The four planes of the roof rise and meet. Where they meet, they open: an irregular glass quadrilateral that is the only way light enters the whole room.

That shape is the mark of this house. It is not a figure chosen for how it looks: it is the plan of that opening. When it appears large, something must be visible through it, because it is an opening and not a label.

Detail of the skylight from below: the quadrangular glass opening with its glazing bars, set between the four sloping concrete planes, and a shaft of light sliding down the right-hand wall.

The mark, large, with the skylight showing through.

The sculpture workshop

Downstairs the building does exactly the opposite. A full glass wall facing the woods, at eye level, and work tables of wood and iron with work half made. The same architects who sealed the painting room were looking here for relaciones de carácter familiar with the natural surroundings.

The same building gives each craft the light it needs: for painting, an opening in the ceiling and no distraction; for sculpture, the woods on the other side of the glass.

On that glass there is a red line painted by hand that runs across every pane from end to end. Nobody asked it to stop at the wall.

The sculpture workshop, 2019. Video by the studio team.

The sculpture workshop seen from above. On the right, a full-height glass wall facing the woods, with an undulating red line painted across the panes and running through all of them. In the centre, a tall dark bronze sculpture with curved arms forming a loop. Trestle tables with small bronzes, maquettes and tools. — The red line, painted across the glass that faces the woods.

The sculpture workshop in use. In the foreground, a white column topped by a rough plaster head, with a vertical black band and thin black legs. At the back, someone in a white cap leans over a wooden bench. Shelves with tools, paint tins and rope; at the back right, the glass wall with the vegetation beyond. — Downstairs the work is done by hand, with the woods in view.

A group of visitors inside the sculpture workshop during an open day. In the centre, a person with a white beard, glasses and a checked shirt explains something with both hands open. Behind them, the white column with the plaster head and the bronze sculpture with looped arms. — Open day at the studio, October 2017.

Photograph: Antonio Navarro Wijkmark

The woods

The work does not stop at the door. There is sculpture on the threshold, on the concrete slab, and more of it down the slope, among the pines and holm oaks, spread across the dry-stone terraces of the garden.

A paved terrace beside the building, under a concrete overhang. Three sculptures in the open air: a totem of rounded forms stacked on a dark pedestal, a branching bronze piece on a concrete cube, and a long thin bronze branch stretched along the ground to a white piece with a hole in it. Behind them, the woods. — Sculptures on the threshold, on the concrete slab.

A sloping garden with dry-stone terraces. Several bronze sculptures in the open air: an elongated horizontal piece on thin legs on the upper terrace, a large hand form on a white pedestal in the foreground, and a tall bulbous form to the right. A person in a blue shirt with white hair stands on the upper terrace, touching one of the legs. — The garden terraces.

Dense sloping woodland of pines and holm oaks. Among the trunks, a slender bronze sculpture raised on a pole, its silhouette echoing the verticality of the trees. To the right, the whitewashed wall of a building and a stone stair; someone in a light shirt climbs the paved path. — A bronze sculpture raised among the garden pines.

The family still works here

The studio is not a set. It is where the work that sustains this site gets done: turning stretchers round, reading what is written on the back, laying the small work out on the floor so it can be compared, deciding.

On the back of every canvas there are handwritten inscriptions with the title and the year. Much of what is now an inventory record began as one of those lines written on a wooden bar.

Canvases stored facing the wall, showing the wooden stretchers with handwritten title and year and stuck-on paper labels. Among them, a few works turned face out. Someone in a white shirt crouches to place small works on the floor while another person watches, standing. — The stretchers, with the title and year written on the back.

The painting room during a selection session. On the far wall, six square canvases hang in a grid. Three people stand in the centre looking down at a row of small works laid out on the floor. On the left wall, a very large blue and red canvas held up with paper. — Small works laid out on the floor so they can be compared.

He died here on 20 October 2023, aged 82.

See the work made in this studio · The life told through the studios

Photographs by Eduard Arranz-Bravo’s team, between 2014 and 2020. The open day, by Antonio Navarro Wijkmark.