Manel Galià

Manel Galià was born in Barcelona into a family of artists and spent his entire childhood in this artistic atmosphere.

Metamorphosis rebirth

He spent a lot of time in his father's studio, observing and helping his father. He often applied the first touches to blank canvases, and his father continued the work begun by the child.

Moving away from his father's style, Narcis Galià, a painter and teacher at the Beaux-Arts in Barcelona, Manel, after studying at the Beaux-Arts, chose a more personal path.

At first, he successfully embarked on a career as a painter, but gradually gave up painting, which he felt did not allow him to achieve his full potential. He turned to sculpture. Through sculpture, he acquired a mode of expression all his own.

There is something of the art brut and art singulier about him that moves us deeply.


Manel has managed to distance himself from his masters and escape the confines of academia, drawing on the roots of Being to express emotion.



I was fascinated by Manel's work because, like true artists, Manel is a visionary. Like the shamans who fascinated me in Central America (my writer friend Ernesto Endara kindly says that I was bewitched by the spirits of the Forest), Manel Galià seems to be connected with the invisible world.

His gracefully twirling sculptures seem to be the materialisation of a dream world, a world to which we are sensitive but which only a chosen few or artists are able to perceive more intuitively.

Manel's sculptures evoke our states of mind, inviting us to introspect and daydream.

The figure sitting on half the bench, the embracing couples evoking infinite tenderness, the dreamers reclining and the bodies twirling with grace or sadness.  

While the body has so often been treated by artists, Manel Galià manages to express the essence of feelings with grace, sensitivity and insight. He invites us to introspective contemplation.


Each sculpture has a vibrant echo within us.

Over and above our states of mind, so sensitively portrayed by the artist, I also perceive those invisible beings that accompany and protect us. I believe that coincidence does not exist.

Manel Galià captures that moment of extreme fragility that we all carry within us, that moment when, just on the point of falling after stumbling, we are able to access a new life.

Metamorphosis? Rebirth?


Corinne Bally