Estudi Tur Costa
Estudi Tur Costa is an art gallery in Ibiza that combines its exhibition programme with avant-garde artists and an art advisory service for collectors, helping them build collections with consistency and a Balearic character. It is also the artist’s atelier of Rafael Tur Costa.
The project was born in the creative spaces of the artists Anneliese Witt and Rafael Tur Costa, who embody the spirit of the island’s artistic avant-garde in the second half of the twentieth century, when Ibiza was an oasis of modernity in Franco’s Spain.
The complex that houses the gallery is an example of contemporary and rationalist architecture: a new building by the twice-awarded architect Marc Tur, and the Tur Witt house, designed by the architect Erwin Broner.
As befits the twenty-first century, the new building incorporates bioclimatic design principles, renewable energy systems, natural building techniques and a wastewater regeneration system that reuses the water to irrigate the gardens.
The Estudi Tur Costa team (Marcos Tur Witt, Helena L. Pezzi) combines its work as art consultants with the development of artistic projects aligned with the aesthetics and philosophy of the Anneliese Witt – Rafael Tur Costa Cultural Association, created to promote art and culture on the island and to preserve, manage and share the work of Tur Costa and Anneliese Witt.
Tur Costa and Ibizan abstract art
From a dark, expressive informalism to a cosmopolitan informalism, Rafael Tur Costa is regarded as one of the most internationally recognised figures of Ibizan contemporary art in the second half of the twentieth century.
His self-taught style was strengthened by the stimulating influence of artists who lived on the island from the 1950s onwards, such as Erwin Broner, the El Paso group, the Dau al Set movement and the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Berlin.
His first exhibition was held in Ibiza in 1962, marking the start of a long local and international career that immediately drew the attention and admiration of leading critics.
Among his most notable exhibitions are those in Madrid, San Francisco and the International Kunstmesse in Basel, as well as the shows devoted to him in Palma de Mallorca and Barcelona.
Several exhibitions on Tur Costa have also been presented at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Ibiza, including one devoted to the drawings of his early period, rooted in informalism and gesture, which already revealed his later interest in constructive geometry. From those austere and eloquent drawings, with a graphic automatism connected in some way to surrealist doctrine, Tur Costa gradually introduced chromatic qualities that flowed into the metaphor of light and would later become relief.
“Rafael Tur Costa’s work has always been bound to Ibiza. He has always lived there, worked there, and from there he has projected his aesthetic imagination and the practice of art. (…) And although his work became known on the mainland and internationally, his references and his world have always been tied to the island and to the movement of modern visual arts and architecture.”
Antoni Marí
Rafael died in December 2020 at the age of 94, shortly after the opening of the exhibition La llum del fragment at Es Baluard Museu in Palma de Mallorca. The exhibition was accompanied by the Gold Medal of the Balearic Government, and La llum del fragment has since also been shown at the Museum of Modern Art in Collioure, France. In the last years of his life he also received the Gold Medal of the Consell Insular d’Eivissa and the Xarc Prize from his home town, Santa Eulària des Riu. Earlier awards include First Mention at the Joan Miró International Prize in Barcelona (1973), the Diario de Ibiza Prize (1997) and the Ramon Llull Prize for the Arts, awarded by the Balearic Government (2001).
Anneliese Witt: art educator and ceramist
ANNELIESE WITT (Berlin, 1935 – Ibiza, 2018) was an art educator and ceramist. In 1954 she finished her studies in Konstanz and began studying at the School of Fine Arts in Berlin, where she graduated in art education in 1959. In 1955 she came to Ibiza for the first time, with a group of fine arts students from the Hochschule für Bildende Künste accompanied by Professor Curt Lahs.
In 1960 she married the Ibizan painter Rafael Tur Costa and settled permanently on the island, where she built her career as an art educator. Alongside her teaching, she graduated in Applied Arts from the Escuela de Artes y Oficios de Ibiza (1976), when she first came into contact with ceramics through classes with Joan Planells “Daifa” and Antoni Pomar. She also studied at the Ceramics School of La Bisbal (1981) and attended classes with the ceramist Antonio Peinado (1981). From 1982 onwards she developed a remarkable body of work as a ceramist and took part in several exhibitions. Since 2023 her work has been part of the collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art of Eivissa.
The Tur Costa house by Erwin Broner
The Tur Costa house by Erwin Broner stands in a residential area on the outskirts of Jesús. The particular brief of the original project, a house with a studio for a painter, was answered by creating several spaces, almost isolated from one another.
The house creates its own references within the bounded interior of its rooms. Its volumetric breakdown produces a balanced play of solids and voids, a sequence of courtyards between the built volumes and the perimeter wall, each acting as the boundary and visual reference of the other.
Thanks to Erwin Broner, founder of Grupo Ibiza 59 (and author of its founding charter), Ibiza became one of the main centres of abstract painting. Through the drive of Broner and figures such as Erwin Bechtold, Hans Laabs, Katja Meirowsky, Bob Munford, Egon Neubauer, Antonio Ruiz, Bertil Sjöeberg and Heinz Trökes, this art spread across the island and Spain and gave Ibiza international standing as a modern art centre.
