Miguel Peña

Madrid, 1951

He left the School of Architecture to devote himself fully to painting. At the School of Arts and Crafts he was taught by Pedro Mozos and Antonio López Torres, and in ceramics his maestros were Manuel Alcorlo and Julio Quesada. He furthered his studies with scholarships from the Juan March Foundation (1976) and the Culture Ministry (1981).

He is a standard-bearer of figuration, ever-present in contemporary Spanish art, with an exceptional talent for drawing, revealing traces of the Picasso-sculptor through nude bodies evocative of classical Antiquity. He frames his figures in almost theatrical and architectural spaces, wrapped in smooth colour and Mediterranean light. His beginnings as an architect shaped his particular way of studying perspective, defining almost arithmetic proportions, as in his work "Mirando al futuro" (Looking Towards the Future) for the 1996 explosives calendar.

Fernando Huici, art critic, observed that "...The personal story of Miguel Peña was animated by a voluntary eccentricity with which his work is imbued. This perverse perspective, affecting the terrain of circumstances, is a cornerstone of his discourse, a shapeless instrument which subtly, almost morally, forces and deforms his invocation of the past. An underlying vein of caricature which runs through his figures, their equivocal anatomy itself, and that tense and rare balance that guides, in general, his compositions and is, perhaps, the roughest and most disquieting ingredient on which he builds the stifling beauty of his images".

1996 Miguel Peña Looking towards the future Oil on canvas 100 x 81 cm.