Hugo Fontela

Through his work, which is committed to nature and focused on the possibilities of painting, Hugo Fontela (Grado, Principality of Asturias, 1986) is a strong advocate of its validity as a means of contemporary expression. Academically trained in his youth in Asturias, Spain, when he was 18 he moved to New York, where he spent a de- cade working, influenced by the post-war art developed in the United States, being particularly interested in the work of artists such as Philip Guston, Milton Resnick and Cy Twombly. Settled in the city, but inspired by the landscapes that the painter would discover on various trips (Florida, Mexico, Rio de Janeiro, Puerto Rico), these landscapes would connect the various series that, under the influence of the landscape in its most lyrical and barren form, he would develop into his first cycles of large-format paintings, which would eventually be included in his series Nowhere Island and The River. For Fontela, these would constitute a return to the very origin of painting, by returning to the nature of his native northern Spain as a scenario to explore its possibilities, in works that in some cases are close to abstraction. Winner of the BMW Painting Award in 2005 and the Princess of Girona Arts Award in 2014, the book The Nature of Painting, the first monographic work dedicated to the artist, was published in 2021. He currently lives in Madrid, where he has his main studio.