Eulàlia Grau was born in 1946 in Terrassa, Catalonia, ten years after the onset of the Spanish Civil War, ten years after the installation of the Franco dictatorship. She grew up in an authoritarian society that conditioned thoughts and bodies with a nationalistic, conservative, macho and Catholic ideology. In 1972, when she began the Etnografia series, she was twenty-six years old; Franco was still in power. […] Eulàlia Grau sought to examine Spanish society from a particular point of view: that of a young Catalan woman deprived of her fundamental rights, as a feminist, as a Marxist. […]. It is important to note that she explores the roles assigned to both women and men, the latter assumed to be athletes, bodybuilders, car buffs, businessmen, soldiers, dictators and gangsters. […] The artworks thus engage with awareness, with total revolution, with a deconstruction of systemic domination in Spain and everywhere else. The artistic context of the 1960s and 1970s, largely influenced by Pop Art and geopolitical and societal upheavals, has led art historians to categorise Eulàlia Grau within Pop Art. Yet she recognises and identifies more with the Dadaist legacy, which participated in an artistic and political questioning of the systems of domination that operate in all societies. […] Her works are part of an international artistic movement governed by an urgency of protest, disobedience and radical opposition.

Excerpt from a text by Julie Crenn published in the exhibition catalogue Eulàlia Grau – Etnografias, Galerie GP & N Vallois, Paris, 2022