ALEJANDRO GARMENDIA

Alejandro Garmendia (San Sebastián, 1959 - 2017) possessed a subversive attitude and an ingenious approach to the aesthetic structure and formal aspects of landscape and architecture. He commandeered them to a point of departure where a plethora of images manifest themselves in a variety of ways, documenting the non-existent and creating the physically impossible. Phantasmagorical objects shift, transforming what we are looking at into a world where scale and plane are mixed together until gravity ceases to exist. Scenes that do not necessarily conform to one particular style, ultimately present a distanced metaphysical vision of an emotional character filled with solitude and melancholy; that brings us into a new painted irreality.

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Alejandro Garmendia lived and worked in numerous cities including San Sebastián, Madrid and New York. He studied Fine Art at the University of País Vasco (UPV/EHU) in Bilbao. Significant solo exhibitions have taken place at Galería Masha Prieto (1988, Madrid, Spain); Galería Antonio Machón (1994, Madrid, Spain); Generous Miracles Gallery (2001, New York City, United States); McClain Gallery (2007, Houston, United States). In 2007 he exhibited alongside Andreas Gursky, Jan Fabre, Per Barclay and Man Ray at the Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid in the group exhibition Perceptions. In March 2018, a year after his death, Alejandro Garmendia was honored through the retrospective, Alejandro Garmendia: Paisajes, enigma y melancolía at the Sala Kubo Museum in San Sebastian, Spain. An attempt to reevaluate his life trajectory. In 2023 Garmendia was included in the group exhibition Años 90 at the San Telmo Museum (San Sebastian), a survey of the various artist collectives that were active in the Basque Country in the late 80’s, 90’s and beginning of the 2000's. His work is included in the permanent collections of the Reina Sofía Museum (Madrid) and the San Telmo Museum (San Sebastian).