125 works of art, publications and documents.

Francesc Abad (Terrassa, 1944), a multidisciplinary artist, trained at the Escola d’Arts i Oficis de Terrassa. After a spell in New York in 1972, he abandoned painting to focus on conceptual practice. He was a founding member of Grup de Treball, an artist collective linked to the opposition to the Franco regime and concerned about the social function of art. After Grup de Treball disbanded in 1975, Abad began to concentrate on developing, in an artistic sense, the philosophical thinking of particular intellectuals from the twentieth century, such as Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Hannah Arendt and Simone Weil, and on reflecting on certain social and political developments, exerting influence on the historical memory of the Franco regime’s forgotten victims.

His works materialised in the form of actions and installations, in which groups of documents, objects, images, texts and graphics are shown, providing proof or reproductions of social phenomena and situations. Concurrent to his exhibitory projects, he has created an extensive series of notebooks known as Diarios del pensar, in which he makes annotations, affixes images, writes texts and highlights ideas.

Abad’s work was represented in the exhibition Fuera de formato (Madrid, February 1983) the first ever survey of conceptual art in Spain. In Athens (Greece) in the year 2000 he presented the interactive installation Wart War. He has created and published several artist books, including Napa(s). Persistir en lo inacabado (Ediciones La Bahía, 2018), in collaboration with Xavier Nueno.

Archivo Lafuente holds roughly 100 items in the Francesc Abad collection, including photographs (related, for example, to the exhibition «Fuera de Formato»), magazines, leaflets, printed matter, catalogues, installations and one-off artist books such as Walter Benjamin (1989–2008), Sarajevo (1995) and Diari del pensar, s.a. (2009–2011).