Jordi Ribes

Jordi Ribes was born in Barcelona in 1972 and continues to live and work there, after a period living in Madrid. He first trained toward graphic design before shifting to painting, studying at the University of Barcelona; the exact program, years, and whether he completed a formal degree are not documented in available sources.

Ribes works in oil, applying paint in extremely fine, translucent layers to build surfaces that read as polished and indistinct, closer to a digital rendering than to traditional brushwork. His imagery draws on fantastical, hybrid figures rich in cultural reference, and his practice is consistently described as blurring the line between digital and pictorial expression, working through contrasts of naive and perverse, familiar and alien, real and fictitious. He is listed in the artist directory of Hangar, Barcelona's arts production center, though the specific dates of any residency there are not documented in available sources.

His exhibition history includes solo shows at Galeria Senda in Barcelona and at L21, including "Take off your socks" at L21's Palma de Mallorca space in February and March 2021, alongside group exhibitions at venues including Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo in Madrid, Arts Santa Monica in Barcelona, the Palais de Tokyo and Galerie Lelong in Paris, and Galeria Oliva Arauna in Madrid. He remains active, with a group exhibition, "Florit / Florit," included at ARCO Madrid in March 2026.

Ribes has been recognized with the Premio Altadis, though the year of that award is not documented in available sources. His institutional standing rests on inclusion in the collection of Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo along with holdings at foundations including Fundacion Altadis, Fundacion Vila Casas, and Fundacion Guasch Coranty, as well as private collections and foundations outside Spain. Critical and gallery writing about his work consistently returns to the same idea: that his fine, sanded-smooth layering of oil paint produces a surface that looks digitally generated even though it is entirely hand-built, and that his figures sit deliberately between the naive and the perverse, the familiar and the alien. No verbatim, attributed review from a named critic at a major outlet could be confirmed in the available sources, so none is quoted here.

Ribes's public auction record is limited and recent. The highest price identified is HKD 1,386,000 (roughly USD 177,000 at conversion) for an untitled painting sold at Phillips Hong Kong in April 2021. A second work, "Amazing Stories," sold for HKD 1,071,000 (roughly USD 137,000) at the same house on 21 June 2022. Both of the publicly documented auction results for the artist come from Phillips Hong Kong, in 2021 and 2022 respectively, which means his secondary market is only beginning to take shape; most of his market activity to date runs through his representing gallery, L21.

Ribes's public auction history is thin, currently limited to two identified results, both from Phillips Hong Kong sales in 2021 and 2022, so any single result should be read as an early data point rather than an established price trend. There is no catalogue raisonne or certificate-of-authenticity program on record; verification runs through his representing gallery, L21, and through auction-house cataloguing. Basic biographical details, including his exact birth date and the year of his Premio Altadis award, are not documented publicly, and collectors should expect some gaps in the paper record even as his institutional profile continues to grow.