Artist profile #235

Matías Sánchez

The Andalusian-born artist from Germany, Matías Sánchez, presents his series of portraits of vagrants and crooks in the capital of Gran Canaria. A gallery of faces with which he pays homage to his favorite artists. Damned creators that, as a general rule, society disdains.

“The important thing is how that painting is painted and how it seduces the viewer. The intelligence of the execution, its mastery, how the artist manages the viewer’s perspective from where he wants. Where does the viewer enter the painting, walk through it, and then exit? Those are the things that make a work of art timeless.”

Throughout his career, he has built an abstract painting that includes a very personal type of figuration with expressionist influences. His work can be understood as a speaker of the society in which we live, through the constant flow of images, tv, tabloids, or the prevailing mediocrity in institutions. His work vindicates painting over everything else.

It was in the edition of ARCO 2002 where the work of Matías obtained an enormous success of public and critic. In ARCO in 2003, his 6-meter oil painting was the cover of the newspaper El País announcing that edition of the fair.

His work has been exhibited in contemporary art centers such as CAC Malaga, where he has exhibited an individual exhibition, or the CAAM - Atlantic Center of Modern Art (Las Palmas de Gran Canaria).

Developed as a painter in Seville, the city where he lives. Multiple individual, national as well as international expositions. His brushstrokes full of paint (oil), direct, dynamic, free, pure and expressionistic, Sánchez establishes his own language from personal experience. Matías creates out of necessity, he finds his protagonists everywhere. His themes vary, but certain icons are repeated with symbolic value.

Matías’work is in both private and public collections such as the Art Museum of the University of Southern California.  Los Angeles, CAC Malaga, CAAC Seville, Benetton Art Spain Collection, Caramba Collection, Luc Caurichon, Paris,  the S. Goodman Collection of New York among others.

Instagram: @matiassanchezmartin