The studio

Domènec Batalla's studio was inaugurated in 1995 at the heart of Ripoll, the city that has been his home since the age of four and that has deeply shaped his artistic imagination. Set in a large, light-filled space, the studio serves as a creative laboratory, a memory archive and a venue for exhibitions and cultural events open to the community.

Within its walls, hundreds of sculptural works have taken shape in terracotta, brass, wood, bronze, iron, steel and stone, as well as the prototypes for the large-scale public monuments in weathering steel that stand today in villages across the region. Batalla's technical training as a lathe mechanic in the textile industry gave him a direct, almost physical relationship with materials — traceable in every cut, every weld and every polished surface of his work.

From 2003 onwards, Domènec shared the studio with his wife, the Japanese-born painter Chikako Taketani. Her presence enriched the space with an Eastern sensibility that conversed with Batalla's Mediterranean rootedness: two visions of the world sharing the same air, the same light and the same silences, until Chikako's death on 2 August 2013.