Antón Lamazares can be characterized as a painter with the vocation of a poet. Born in 1954 in Maceira near Lalin, Galicia he studied at the Franciscan convent of Santo Antonio de Herbón, a parish of the municipality of Padrón, in the province of A Coruña. After first exhibitions in the 1970s in Spain he moved to Madrid in 1978. His recognition began to spread in the 80s across Spain and due to his exhibitions to cities like Stockholm, Basel, Winterthur, Knogge Heist, Köln, Stuttgart, Paris and New York. Further important stations were the Fulbright Scholarship in 1987 in New York, his stopover in the Cité des Arts 1990/91 in Paris and his travel to Berlin in 1993, to study the work of Caspar David Friedrich – and in 2004 to identify the city as a place to open his studio, find inspiration and a place to live and work.

His artistic output can be characterized by an inseparable alliance between material and poetry. With the substances cardboard, wood, industrial paint, oil and varnish, occasionally gouache on paper or wooden boards, he expresses the dialogue between the soul and memory, sensuality and spirituality.

From an initial, playful expressionism in the 1980s, he has since moved among informalism and abstraction, with a certain drift towards minimalism in his most recent phase.

His life experiences merge with his paintings, not only in the Galician sense of morrina – the nostalgic, melancholic longing for once homeland – but as enriching experiences which compose his work, at the very least, difficult to catalogue in terms of any single tendency. So it seems all the more appropriate to the artist, he was awarded the Gold Insignia by the University of Santiago de Compostela and the Medal of Castelao by the Xunta de Galicia Regional Government in honour of his lifelong dedication to art and the huge significance of his life’s work: clear and distinctive paintings, resulting from an endless inventive capacity which was nourished by the foundation of informalism; from everything and yet from nothing at all.

recent exhibitions (selection):

2011 Museo de Pontevedra, Retrospective (paintings 1980-2010)
2010 Centre Cultural Deputacion Ourense
2009 Queen Sofia Spanish Institute, New York
2008 National Museum Amman, Jordan
2007 Museum Kiscelli Budapest, Hungary