Antoni Pitxot

Antoni Pitxot i Soler (Catalan pronunciation: [ənˈtɔni piˈtʃɔt]; Figueres, Girona, January 5, 1934 – June 12, 2015) was a Spanish Catalan painter and a longtime friend and collaborator of Salvador Dalí.

Life and work

Pitxot was born into a family with many artists in its ranks, among them, his uncle Ramon Pichot. He began studying drawing at the age of thirteen, and he exhibited regularly in Lisbon, Bilbao, Barcelona, and Madrid in his twenties and thirties, winning many prizes, including the Gold Medal painting prize in Barcelona's La Punyalada competition in 1965.

At the beginning of the 1960s, he was a close friend of the French painter Maurice Boitel, who painted many pictures on the Pitxot family's property in Cadaqués, a small port town on the Mediterranean Sea near the French border, that was also painted by Pablo Picasso and André Derain.

In 1966, Pitxot took up permanent residence in Cadaqués, where his family had owned a summer house since the end of the 19th century. He began to experiment with surrealism: in particular, he became focused on anthropomorphic figures composed of the stones that lined the seashores near his home. Pitxot worked in a unique way: he would build sculptures from stones, and then paint those sculptures in oil.

Much of Pixtot's work is concerned with allegory and myth, including the figure of Mnemosyne, the mother of the nine muses who personified memory, and a series of works about The Tempest.

Pitxot's association with Salvador Dalí began before his birth, because their families were acquainted. But Dalí became an early supporter of Antonio Pitxot's work, and eventually asked him to co-design the Dalí Theatre and Museum (Teatre-Museu Dalí) in Figueres, Spain.