Collection: Javier Mariscal
Valencian designer, adopted by Barcelona. "In 2050 I ́ll be 100 years old". Javier Mariscal's life is a love affair with drawing. Javier Mariscal was born into a big family in the darker days of the post-war era in Spain. The Mediterranean, the albufera, the light, the friendships, the bars, the streets, the joy to live irrevocably mark his professional trajectory and personal life. From an early age he looks at the world imagining new shapes, stories and characters while escaping all stereotypes and any kind of labeling. At the end of the 70s, he draws his most poetic piece in only three syllables, changing the projection of his adoptive city: Bar Cel Ona (word play in Catalan, which literally means "Bar Sky Wave", that sounds like Barcelona). His audacity runs with the great challenges he takes up. Designing the mascot for the 1992 Olympic Games in Barcelona, "that dog, squished by a truck on the highway" named Cobi, will be the starting point for his Estudio Mariscal in an old leather factory, five minutes away from the sea. And so, the big commissions arrive in which Mariscal imprints his particular universe: vital, full of stories, cartoons, fun calligraphies, and of course his distorted lines that long to break the limits. "They pay me to have fun!".
His trips to California, Japan, Paris, or Portugal decisively influence his drawings. He works with designers, engineers and architects such as Arata Isozaki and with companies like Memphis, Akaba, Bidasoa, BD Ediciones de Diseño, Moroso, Nani Marquina, Alessi, Sangetsu, Magis, Cosmic, Santa &Cole and Phaidon. He wins the "Premio Nacional de Diseño" in 1999 and exhibits in the Georges Pompidou Center in Paris, and participates in the Kassel Documentary, to which several retrospectives and up like: Mariscal Drawing Life in the London Design Museum, Mariscal en La Pedrera or The Art Player in Korea.Illustrations and comics strips invade covers and pages in the New Yorker, El Pais and the Japanese magazine Apo.
In 2010, Javier Mariscal once again changes the game to venture into animated film with "Chico & Rita" along side Fernando Trueba. The movie wins a Goya Award and is nominated to the Oscars for Best Animated Picture. During 2017 he designs some animatics for the emblematic Quad Cinemas in New York, he illustrates the summer cover of the New Yorker and a new mascot for the multinational ROCA. Mariscal is currently working on the preliminary drawings of a personal project, an animated documentary movie co-directed with Fernando Trueba, a comic book that explains the formation of our planet and the creatures that live on it, and the sketches for a travel journal of Los Angeles for the French brand Louis Vuitton. His international projection and media coverage will accompany him in his conferences and workshops all over the world.
