Antoni Pitxot

Antoni Pitxot, or Antonio Pichot Soler in castillan, (born 1934 in Figueres) is a Catalan painter who was a longtime friend and collaborator with Salvador Dali.

Pitxot, whose name is pronounced "peet-shot," was born into a family with many artists in its ranks, among whom 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 sixties, he was a close friend of the French painter Maurice Boitel who painted many pictures in 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 Dali 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 Teatro Museoin 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. Pitxot has been a protector of Dali's legacy after his death: he has led, and sat on the board, of several Dali 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 academian for Cadaques of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of Saint George.