Matías Palau Ferré 1921–2000 was a painter, sculptor and ceramicist born in Montblanch, Tarragona province, Autonomous Community of Catalonia, Spain. He is known as the painter who burned his pictures. He studied at the Royal Catalan Academy of Fine Arts of San Jorge Barcelona and moved to Paris in 1957 where he was one of Pablo Picasso’s disciples.

He started with some cubist-inspired works on oil canvases. Over the years he also made ceramics and sculptures.

After rising to fame in Spain he held exhibitions in various foreign countries, including France, the UK and the USA. His most important works are Woman and Moon, Montblanch and Guer-Blanc. Palau Ferré achieved notoriety due to his sudden mood swings that led her to burn his oil paintings in 1974 after a dispute he had with a gallery owner. In protest against what he defined as “prostitution of art”, he continued to systematically burn all his oil works that were made available to him over a period of about twenty years. He normally scattered the ashes of his paintings ceremonially on the Francolí River in his homeland, but some of the ashes on his canvases were saved and became part of an art exhibition in Pennsylvania, USA. His protracted protest led to him stop painting oil canvases and prohibit the few that survived from being exposed until 1989. In his last artistic phase he painted only in India ink on thick paper following a technique of his own invention. He always signed his works with his two surnames “Palau Ferré”.

Palau Ferré died on January 1, 2000 in Montblanch and the town council of that town named a street after him that same year. At the gates of the artist’s centenary, which is commemorated in 2021, several museums have begun to exhibit works by Palau Ferré. Likewise. El pintor que cremava els seus quadres de él (Editorial Base, 2020), an essay on Palau Ferré written by the historian Francesc Marco-Palau, the cubist painter’s great-nephew, has also been published. Palau Ferré de Montblanc Museum of Art