Son of the draughtsman Juan Grau Miró, Grau Sala combined his attendance at the Barcelona School of Fine Arts with an essentially self-taught training. In 1930 he held his first exhibition at the Badriñas gallery in Barcelona. At the outbreak of the Civil War, in 1936, he moved to Paris, where he settled in the Montparnasse colony of Spanish artists. That same year he was awarded the first Carnegie Prize.

During the twenty-five years he spent there he became closely acquainted with the avant-garde, although he always favoured a colourist figuration derived from Impressionism and Fauvism. It was a path already taken by the commercial circuit, surpassed in terms of novelty by Cubism and Surrealism, but which was kept alive at a h...