Matarranz

Mariano Matarranz was born in Madrid in 1952. He trained at the Méndez Ruiz studio and at the San Fernando School of Fine Arts in Madrid. He held his first exhibition in 1972 at the Club de Prensa in the same city.

In the 1980s he was one of the most important emerging painters in Madrid, working with the Egam gallery and taking part in several national and international projects. In 1995 he settled with his family in Gijón, Asturias, and began a period of significant institutional exhibitions, becoming one of the most prolific painters in the region between the late 1990s and the early twenty-first century. With the support of the Vértice gallery in Oviedo, he took part in fairs such as Art Chicago, the Chicago International Art Fair, Art Basel and ARCO.

His painting, lyrical in character, combines experimentation with materials and the frequent use of oxidation. He is interested in the balance between the physical and the industrial, the passage of time and the relationship with space: he scratches, tears and builds personal symbols out of small details, using techniques such as frottage, tearing and gesture, in a creative process that lies at the centre of his work and treats painting as an almost mystical way of connecting with his surroundings.

His work is held in the collection of the Fundación María Cristina Masaveu Peterson, which acquired the painting "La huella del aire I" (2014), mixed media on canvas, at the JustMad fair in 2015.