Biography
Born
1919
Died
1998
Nationalities
Catalan
Spanish
Spanish
Birth place
Barcelona
Death place
Barcelona
A prolific Catalan poet, Joan Brossa was born in Barcelona. He began to write poetry while fighting in the Spanish Civil War in 1938, and later became interested in the power of the unconscious. This led to his association with the Surrealist movement. A key figure in the Catalan avant-garde, Brossa was one of the founders of the art and literature review ‘Dau al Set’ and was a friend of Joan Miró and Antoni Tàpies. Brossa regarded himself primarily as a poet, although his definition of poetry was broad, encompassing theatrical work, cinema, visual poetry, automatic writing, installations and object-poetry. His object-poems use everyday objects in a surprising manner, in the tradition of Dada and Surrealism.