Ángel Marcos

Biography

Ángel Marcos is an established contemporary artist, who originates from Spain. Born in 1955 in Valladolid, he now lives and works between Madrid and his hometown. Ángel Marcos grew up during the 1970s and was influenced by the artistic culture of the time. The art sphere of the 1970s was characterised by a high intellectualism that served the aim to evolve and strengthen the viewers, specifically as a response to the many tensions of the previous decade. One of the most important movements of that time was Conceptualism, which appeared as an offshoot of Minimalism. A branch of Conceptualism was the initial idea of environmentalism, which took art into earth itself, sculpting the land and bringing art to the outdoors. For the first time since the decline of Abstract Expressionism, Expressive figure painting slowly resurfaced and regained its status, especially in Germany through the works of world renowned figures Gerhard Richter, Anselm Kiefer and Georg Baselitz.

Ángel Marcos is one of the photographers who has known how to negotiate the duality of photography as a means of capturing reality and be artistic in its rendition. The craftsman photographer and the artist photographer have known how to maintain a dialogue like few others. The aesthetics and politics of Marcos always elucidate a space of contrasts: a dialectic dualism typical of the Baroque, a dialogue of opposites; light and darkness, rationality and natural spontaneity, gold and putrefaction, dogma and inquisition.

After some early works about the asymmetries of human couples, and Estampas personales where he stages the image, Marcos recounts, primarily through the Paisajes, the vastness of the landscape of Castile, converting it into the plane of a still life, a place inhabited by death and solitude. One perceives the aridity of the affective memory the dryness of the photograph in this way establishes, in the homeland, his stylistic identity with sobriety. Here you have a metaphysical identity of the poetics of emptiness, a politics aimed at the analysis of opposites.

His works then shift thematicallly from the landscape to decontextualized interiors, from desolation to the lyrical object or the lamenting person. The external box encapsulates a huge existential emptiness, filling it with extreme folly.