Joseph Cals - lithograph - 'Tribute to Graham Sutherland' -1980 (Print 190)

Joseph Cals (1949) was born in Stein, near Maastricht, in the south of the Netherlands, a region steeped in history. “As a child I visited an excavation of a prehistoric settlement near the old village centre, where the earth was meticulously scraped and examined. For a child in a time without television, this was an inexhaustible reservoir to feed the imagination”. Another important experience from his youth was the AFS grant he won to study in the US. It was 67/68, a tumultuous year. The war in Vietnam, race riots, the assassinations of both Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy. Paradoxically enough, there was a huge rise in the arts at the same time. All these impressions merged in his work.