Secundino Hernández
Untitled
Artist
Secundino Hernández
(1975, Madrid), Spain
Original Title
Untitled
Date2019
Mediumrabbit skin glue, chalk, CC, titanium white pigment on canvas
Dimensions158 × 196 cm
Classificationspaintings
Credit LineKunsthalle Praha
DescriptionSecundino Hernández’s large-format canvases are notable for their unique aesthetics and artistic spontaneity. They are underpinned by Hernandez’s experimental approach to the history of painting, which endows his works with a conspicuous tension between form and content as well as between calculatedness and spontaneity. He produces his abstract paintings in series; while some are more expressive, others betray more minimalist and monochromatic tendencies. The pieces are generally marked by compact signification, direct contact with the canvas, and a search for the moment of completion and enjoyment of painting. Hernández primarily focuses on the painting’s surface and on the process of creation, which he understands as a moment of rethinking and restructuring the existing world. In his earlier works, abstract shapes coalesce into bodily fragments with grotesque anomalies; these pieces contain elements of pastiche, surrealist automatic drawing, and caricatures in the style of cadavre exquis. Around the year 2010, this figuratively abstract expression began to shift toward an abstract, gestural style which combines painting and drawing, with figurative elements almost entirely disappearing from Hernandéz’s work. He uses a diverse range of artistic techniques, including washing, scraping the top layers of paintings, and applying color pigments directly from their tubes.
This luminous painting Untitled from 2019 is defined by vertical partition achieved by scraping through painted layers to reveal the raw canvas, giving the painting an additional haptic dimension and a structuring at odds with traditional painterly approaches to perspective. The composition is evenly distributed across the entire surface of the canvas, and the piece is defined by a disruption of its painted structure, thus thematizing questions of destruction and redefinition of the pictorial surface. However, the work does not incorporate the intense damage employed by other figures in the history of painting; rather, it is a process of delicate scraping through the upper layer using fine lines and larger shapes.
Spanish artist Secundino Hernández (*1975, Madrid) spent several years working in Berlin. Currently, he is living and working back in his hometown of Madrid, where he had previously studied at the Universidad Complutense. He has had solo exhibitions at institutions such as the Meadow Museum at the Southern Methodist University in Dallas, the Centro de Arte Contemporáneo in Malaga, the Tiadehalli Helsinki, and the Yuz Museum in Shanghai. His work has also been displayed in group exhibitions at the Royal Academy in London, the Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin, the ArtCenter in Los Angeles, and the Canberra Museum and Gallery in Canberra, among other spaces. He has been awarded several prizes such as the Generación 2007 de Caja Madrid (1st prize), the Generación 2004 de Caja Madrid, the Premio Joven (“Youth Award”) 2003 from the Fundación General der Universidad Complutense de Madrid, and a recognition award at the Generación 2002 de Caja Madrid.
This luminous painting Untitled from 2019 is defined by vertical partition achieved by scraping through painted layers to reveal the raw canvas, giving the painting an additional haptic dimension and a structuring at odds with traditional painterly approaches to perspective. The composition is evenly distributed across the entire surface of the canvas, and the piece is defined by a disruption of its painted structure, thus thematizing questions of destruction and redefinition of the pictorial surface. However, the work does not incorporate the intense damage employed by other figures in the history of painting; rather, it is a process of delicate scraping through the upper layer using fine lines and larger shapes.
Spanish artist Secundino Hernández (*1975, Madrid) spent several years working in Berlin. Currently, he is living and working back in his hometown of Madrid, where he had previously studied at the Universidad Complutense. He has had solo exhibitions at institutions such as the Meadow Museum at the Southern Methodist University in Dallas, the Centro de Arte Contemporáneo in Malaga, the Tiadehalli Helsinki, and the Yuz Museum in Shanghai. His work has also been displayed in group exhibitions at the Royal Academy in London, the Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin, the ArtCenter in Los Angeles, and the Canberra Museum and Gallery in Canberra, among other spaces. He has been awarded several prizes such as the Generación 2007 de Caja Madrid (1st prize), the Generación 2004 de Caja Madrid, the Premio Joven (“Youth Award”) 2003 from the Fundación General der Universidad Complutense de Madrid, and a recognition award at the Generación 2002 de Caja Madrid.
