Josep Riera i Aragó is a Spanish Postwar & Contemporary artist who was born in 1954.

​

 

In 1973 he enrols at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Barcelona and very soon, this same year, start exhibiting his work in several Spanish galleries. He has dedicated himself both to graphic work and to painting and sculpture. He recreates in his work a world of machines and gadgets that, humorously, recall those described in nineteenth-century science fiction stories, sometimes with a certain poignancy. This way, he criticises the irrational dazzlement of the power of the machine, as a symbol of progress, omnipresent in the twentieth century. He has organised countless solo and group exhibitions and is present in different collections of Museums.

​

 

 

In 1985 he produces large paintings of lighthouses, zeppelins and flying submarines on iron and wood with lead, zinc and other reliefs, most of which he works by employing chemical reactions and fire.In 1990 his sculpture Buried Submarine, commissioned by Barcelona City Council, is unveiled in the Hiroshima Gardens in Barcelona. In 1991 Nishinomiya City Council in Japan commissions him to produce Avió Najio, which is to be sited in the central square of a new city being built. In Japan he becomes especially interested in the temples in the region of Kansai.In 2001 he produced landscape sculptures and his first Islands sculptures.