Self-portrait Spain
Nuria Farre Abejon is a Spanish hyperrealist artist living and working in Barcelona, Spain.
Her often hyper-realistic works revolve around issues that concern her as a young woman: anxiety, melancholy, family, memories and identity. At first, Nuria created translucent paintings through which she represented the duality between life and death. Later she explored self-portraiture, and today Nuria tries to explore her present through photographs from her family album, through which she creates interesting visual oil collages.
Frederico Aguilar Alcuaz is a Filipino abstract painter, sculptor and ceramist, and master tapestry artist.
He studied painting at the University of the Philippines' School of Fine Arts, then lived and worked both in the Philippines and Spain, and in Brno, Czech Republic, he worked extensively on tapestries.
Alcuaz has earned international acclaim with his vivid abstract works in various genres and techniques, and he has exhibited extensively internationally.
Alfredo Castañeda was a Mexican surrealist painter.
Castañeda had been interested in painting and drawing since childhood, but first became an architect, earning a degree in architecture from the University of Mexico. During his studies, he continued to paint as a hobby, which he became more and more serious about over the years. At university, Alfredo became acquainted with the painter, sculptor and architect Matthias Goeritz, as well as the work of René Magritte. Both played a huge role in the young artist's worldview.
After his studies, Castañeda worked as an architect and in 1969 had his first solo exhibition at Galeria de Arte Mexicano. His work has also been shown internationally numerous times in the United States and in many Latin American countries, including Mexico. His work is collected in collections and museums throughout the Americas, Europe and Asia.
Alfredo Castañeda is known for his surrealist paintings, often portraits. The same character appears in many of his paintings, sometimes revealed in multiple versions of himself. This person (often resembling the artist himself) seems to be engaged in an endless dialog with himself, involving the viewer as well.
José Villegas Cordero was a Spanish painter, master of costume and genre scenes, who directed the Prado Museum from 1901 to 1918.
He studied at the School of Fine Arts in Seville and became known as a talented genre painter, noting interesting domestic scenes and accurately portraying the characters. Domestic painting at that time was very popular with the public. The artist also deals with the themes of the East, with great skill drawing pictures from sketches he made on a trip to Morocco.
In 1898 Villegas Cordero was appointed director of the Spanish Academy in Rome, and in 1901 he was appointed director of the Museo del Prado, the same museum that had once copied Velázquez's paintings himself while studying his art.
