Artist Ricardo Galan Urrejola
Transforming Reality. Artist Ricardo Galan Urrejola
Ricardo Galan Urrejola is called “the artist of urban space.” His paintings are filled with cars, buses and trams, billboards, traffic lights, old and modern buildings with shops on the ground floors.
Not the most aesthetic subjects, but the artist knows how to captivatingly depict the most unsightly city streets even in the rain.
“I am more interested in movement, the same transport that floods the cities, than static scenes.”
Urrejola created many works depicting Madrid, London, New York, Amsterdam, Paris. He himself considered them to be disparate, so he collected them together in the book “The Artist and the Cities.”
The artist shows the city as a great human invention, each work is generalized in some way, but also unique. Streets that seem familiar, tunnels where the red light of a traffic light breaks through deep shadows, or streets where the sun paints the sky pink, flashing like a flame in the glass of a car.
Urrejola was born in 1956 in Cadiz, Spain. As a child, he was given a book called “One Hundred Masterpieces of Painting”, which inspired him to create.
At the age of twelve, the boy, without a mentor, tried to copy the works of Gainsborough, Murillo, Velazquez and Rembrandt.
Urrejola later studied with the artist Torres Bru in Cadiz, then entered the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of Saint Isabella of Hungary in Seville. He also studied art history at the University of Cadiz.
His work is a beautiful, subtle combination of abstraction and realism.
“I feel a tendency towards abstraction, but without losing the imagery. What I see becomes a personal perception. I transform reality using the language of painting.”
His fictional lighthouses are also fascinating. The series of works with lighthouses appeared with the aim of capturing “the nature of loneliness, to create oneself anew.”
Urrejola also paints still lifes, which he rarely gives titles to.
Ricardo Galán Urrejola currently combines teaching with painting, and collaborates with several art galleries.
