Hockey, Olympic Suite No.2 by Jordi Alumà

The Hockey Museum (THM) holds in its art collection a limited-edition print of a female hockey player by Spanish artist Jordi Alumà (pictured). After a long and distinguished life, Alumà passed away earlier this year on 8 June 2021.

The print was donated to the museum in January 2014 by then International Hockey Federation (FIH) President Leandro Negre. The artwork is part of a series titled Olympic Suite No.2 which was commissioned by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) in 1984. Hockey is one of 20 different Olympic sports depicted within the suite.

Artist Biography

Jordi Alumà was born in 1924 in Barcelona and raised in an artistic home. His grandfather was a sculptor; his father, Josep Alumà, was a painter and poster artist of some renown, and his mother designed pieces of goldsmithery.

Aged 13, the young Alumà began his artistic studies in 1937 as an apprentice in the Propaganda Department of Cataluña during the Spanish Civil War. in 1941 he joined the craft workshops of the Salesian College papal order in Barcelona. There he studied altarpiece painting and quickly identified wood as his favourite artistic medium. Alumà painted on wood for most of his life, until he switched to Japanese paper following a trip to Japan in 2001. “[Japanese paper] is a wonderful thing that they have made by hand for centuries” he exclaimed. “I found [the] texture was similar to the surface of an altarpiece but without the thickness, which was ideal for working on.”

Alumà professed his admiration for Italian artists Piero della Francesca and Amedeo Modigliani. Fittingly given these influences, he described himself as “a passionate stylistic painter with a line between Cubism and Romanesque”. This neatly describes the figurative art style evident in Alumà’s internationally renowned work from the 1960s onwards where he moved away from religious themes. These works include suites of different Olympic disciplines for the IOC, such as the hockey player print in THM collection.

Click here to discover more art in THM collection.