Fornas. The image of Catalonia in the 60s

In the 1960s, a cultural industry was launched in Catalonia that sought to restore its presence in Catalan society, lost and silenced by the Francoist regime since the end of the Spanish Civil War. Catalan culture stopped being on the defensive and clearly adopted more creative and more dynamic attitudes. A reaction that sought to show itself not just with content but also through image.

Jordi Fornas i Martínez (Barcelona, 1927-2011), trained at the Escola de Belles Arts Sant Jordi in Barcelona, was fully committed to pictorial and artistic production. He began receiving personal commissions in the early 1960s and put painting aside to devote himself entirely to graphic design. Fornas was the designer of several of the most important modern pillars of the cultural renaissance that took place in the second half of the 20th century and he gave a graphic identity to the new mass culture in Catalan that developed in Catalonia.

Fornas’s graphic work was influenced by British pop-art aesthetics, the Swiss school and, above all, French graphics of the 1950s. The mixture of all these influences is expressed in resources and uses making up one of the cornerstones of what we call the Fornas style.