Antoni Pitxot
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Antoni Pitxot, or Antonio Pichot Soler in Castilian, (born 1934 in Figueres, Catalonia) is a Spanish painter who was a longtime friend and collaborator of Salvador Dalí.
Pitxot, whose name is pronounced "peet-shot," was born into a family with many artists in its ranks, among them Ramon Pichot. He began studying drawing at the age of thirteen, and he exhibited regularly in Lisbon, Barcelona, and Madrid in his twenties and thirties, winning many prizes, including the Gold Medal painting prize in Barcelona's La Punyalada competition in 1965.
At the beginning of the 1960s, he was a close friend of the French painter Maurice Boitel, who painted many pictures on Pitxot family's property.
In 1966, Pitxot took up permanent residence in Cadaqués, a small port town on the Balearic Sea near the French border.
He began to experiment with surrealism: in particular, he became focused on anthropomorphic figures composed of the stones that lined the seashores near his home. Pitxot worked in a unique way: he would build sculptures from stones, and then paint those sculptures in oil.
Much of Pitxot's work is concerned with allegory and myth, including the figure of Mnemosyne, the mother of the nine Muses who personified memory, and a series of works about The Tempest.
Pitxot's association with Salvador Dalí began before his birth, because their families were acquainted. But Dalí became an early supporter of Antonio Pitxot's work, and eventually asked him to co-design the Dalí Theatre-Museum (Teatro Museo) in Figueres, Spain. There is also a permanent exhibition of Pitxot's work on one floor of that museum.
Pitxot and Dalí were nearly inseparable in the last years of Dalí's life: designing Dalí's museum, teaching art, and exchanging ideas about their work. Pitxot has been a protector of Dalí's legacy after his death: he has led, and sat on the board, of several Dalí foundations. He became the museum's director after Dalí's death.
Pitxot is a respected Spanish artist in his own right. In the year 2000, he was appointed corresponding academician for Cadaques of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of Saint George.
His grandson is the Catalan actor and imitator Bruno Oro Pitxot.
