artist/ Henri Iglésis

France

Henri Iglésis is a contemporary artist of Catalan origin, inventor of the blown sheet metal process… He was born in 1964 in Perpignan, his grandfather was a blacksmith and his father, a turner-toolmaker.

In 2008, this boilermaker became a sculptor, by the surprising invention of a process that would become his trademark: blown sheet metal.

The figure of his father, a turner-fitter, was certainly decisive in the artistic development of the young boy. Henri Iglésis spent his childhood in the workshop of this craftsman whom he loved and admired with fervor. “Don’t touch anything, watch and you will learn” he would tell him quietly… From then on, it is easier to understand Henri’s passion for manual work and metals, which he would rub shoulders with all his life and from which he would draw his art.

Henri Iglésis finished his schooling in 1981, after a double diploma in “boilermaker, sheet metal” and “welder”, and worked in a manufacturing workshop without further delay. He continued to regularly attend his father’s workshop, in which he made several objects in sheet metal worked with a hammer.

It was in 2008, during the creation of a statue in the image of his son, that he came up with the idea of ​​injecting air into a piece of sheet metal that had been welded beforehand.

The majority of his works are sculptures shaped by inflation. This original shaping process, which he refined and developed, is now officially registered, and the expression “blown sheet metal” is copyrighted.

It is therefore through this unique technique that the artist’s whimsical creativity unfolds, allowing his overflowing imagination and mischievous humor to take concrete form. His refined works are imbued with a characteristic lightness: visual lightness, mixing the weight of patinated metal with the suppleness of air; but above all the lightness of a dreamlike, colorful, carefree world, into which Henri Iglésis draws us.