HUGO FONTELA

The Lily and the Harvest

 

OPENING

 

Thursday, January 22, 2025

 

 

 

 

 

Trained in Asturias during his youth, he moved to New York shortly after turning eighteen, where he would live for a decade working under the influence of postwar American art. During that period, various trips to natural landscapes—Florida, Mexico, Rio de Janeiro, Puerto Rico—would shape the series that make up his first large-format cycles: Nowhere Island and The River. In these works, the landscape appears in its most lyrical and stripped-down dimension, in some cases bordering on abstraction.

 

For Fontela, this first solo exhibition at Espacio Valverde represents a return to the very origins of painting, revisiting the nature of his native north as a territory to explore the possibilities of the medium.

Winner of the BMW Painting Prize (2005) and the Princess of Girona Arts Prize (2014), he currently lives and works in Madrid.