The artistic practice of Alain Urrutia (Bilbao, 1981) focuses on the relationship between image, memory, and perception, through a predominantly painterly practice that often begins with photographs and pre-existing images. Rather than simply reproducing them, the artist selects, crops, and transforms them, creating autonomous images in which reality appears filtered and suspended.

His paintings are characterized by a reduced colour palette, often approaching black and white, as well as by blurring, overlays, and areas of obscurity that remove information from the image. This process slows down the act of looking, creating a distance between what we recognize and what we are actually able to understand.

Memory is a central element of his practice: images and objects are isolated from their original context and recomposed as fragments of a personal and collective archive. In this sense, Urrutia explores the distance between reality and representation, showing how an image can be altered, reinterpreted, and invested with new meaning through the act of looking.

Alain Urrutia

Alain Urrutia [Bilbao, 1981] lives and works in Berlin, Graduated at the Basque Country University and Academia Brera Milano in 2004.

Urrutia has exhibited at international Art Museums, including the Boston Centre for the Arts, CA2M Madrid, the Artium in Victoria, the Juan March Foundation and the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao.

Urrutia is interested in the slow gaze of reality that occurs while he is painting. He works in an intuitive way. The work he has carried out to date is closely related to the idea that in photography, the reality becomes an image and it is subsequently translated into another reality when painted.

In his view, the goal is not to reproduce a mechanical/digital photograph into painting, but to build a pictorial image. The paintings are striking in their ‘emotional impenetrability’, they posses and produce a kind of silence, a demonstrable lack of legibility, even a difficulty that outstrips their subject matter per se. With this notion in mind he slows the process of perception in order to allow paths towards ne interpretations from pre-existing images, urging the viewer to question their assumptions of what they are looking at.

Alain Urrutia [Bilbao, 1981] lives and works in Berlin, Graduated at the Basque Country University and Academia Brera Milano in 2004.

Urrutia has exhibited at international Art Museums, including the Boston Centre for the Arts, CA2M Madrid, the Artium in Victoria, the Juan March Foundation and the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao.

Alain Urrutia [Bilbao, 1981] lives and works in Berlin, Graduated at the Basque Country University and Academia Brera Milano in 2004.

Urrutia has exhibited at international Art Museums, including the Boston Centre for the Arts, CA2M Madrid, the Artium in Victoria, the Juan March Foundation and the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao.

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Alain Urrutia

Pensare con lo sguardo #13

Pensare con lo sguardo #13

Alain Urrutia

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