Antonio Santín
The gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new paintings by Antonio Santín on the occasion of his first solo exhibition in New York.
Santín constructs arresting compositions that simultaneously attract and unsettle in their evocative depictions of sublimated desire. He orchestrates elaborate still-lifes that originate from his own theatrically composed photographs. Visiting his models at their homes, Santín chooses outfits from their personal belongings and assembles each detail of the image. He then transforms each photographic record into a painterly construct in oil on canvas that vacillates between a mimetic three-dimensional space and a heightened reality augmented by surprising shifts in texture and gesture. Deeply rooted in the tradition of Spanish Tenebrism as well as his own training as a sculptor, Santín juxtaposes flattened planes with tangible forms carved by light and shadow to create a continuous perceptual dialogue in each work.
These series of recent related works incorporate the human form as a fetishized object to be hidden or revealed in images that often conjure a cinematic aesthetic. The rug series evolved from his interest in the opacity of fabric as a device to obscure the body with abstract patterns and textures. His newest series of crocheted landscapes of the female form are at once a technical accomplishment of texture and a formal repositioning of the body as a distinct yet abstract mass.
Antonio Santín was born in Madrid in 1978, and received his Degree in Fine Arts from Universidad Complutense de Madrid in 2005. He was an artist in residence at Kunstlerhaus Glogauer in Berlin (2006) and Centre dárt Contemporani Piramidon in Barcelona (2007). He has exhibited internationally and is represented in the collections of Centre national des arts plastiques, Paris and Museu Europeu d’Art Modern, Barcelona and numerous private collections worldwide. Public installations include a permanent sculpture commissioned by the city of Madrid in 2003. Antonio Santín lives and works in Berlin.
