Antonio Pitxot

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Antonio Pitxot (b. 1934) or Antoni Pitxot, is a Spanish surrealist painter who was a longtime friend and collaborator with Salvador Dalí.

Pitxot, whose last name, in the Catalan language, is pronounced "pitshot," was born into a family with many artists in its ranks. He began studying drawing at the age of thirteen, and he exhibited regularly in Lisbon, Bilbao, 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 Cadaques, a small town on the Costa Brava in Catalonia 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 Pixtot'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 Dali became an early supporter of Antonio Pitxot's work, and eventually asked him to co-design the Dali Theatre-Museum in Figueres, Spain. There is also a permanent exhibition of Pitxot's work on one floor of that museum.

Pitxot and Dali were nearly inseparable in the last years of Dali's life: designing Dali's museum, teaching art, and exchanging ideas about their work. Pixtot has been a protector of Dali's legacy after his death: He is the director of the Dali Museum and he is a member of the board of the Gala Salvador Dalí Foundation.

Pitxot is a respected Spanish artist in his own right. In the year 2000, he was appointed corresponding academian for Cadaques of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of Saint George. In the 2004 he received the Gold Medal of Merit in FIne Arts from the King of Spain as a recognition for his work.