Miguel Ángel Fúnez

Graduated in Fine Arts with Extraordinary Prize and Master in Research in Art and Creation by the Complutense University, he won the III Mardel Painting Prize, the II DKV-MAKMA Drawing Prize, the acquisition of the XVII Certamen de Artes Plásticas El Brocense, the XXII Certamen de Dibujo Gregorio Prieto and the II Premio de Arte Grünenthal, among other awards. He currently lives and works in Madrid, and he is the first of our signed artists to expressly link art and happiness when explaining the motivations that led him to start his creative career: “Since I was very young I knew that my happiness was linked to art. It is difficult to pinpoint a starting point through which I decided to work as an artist, I remember that I was always between papers, pencils, paints … “I was always working on some project, especially drawing and, yes, always self-taught, because I do not know why but I never wanted to go to any academy. On the other hand, despite my young age, I was very clear that I would study Fine Arts, a decision that my parents fully supported and I will always be grateful to them”. His beginnings within the professional art circuit are preceded by the First Prize for Contemporary Drawing of the Centenera Jaraba Foundation that he was awarded in 2011, and an early and constant support from the critic and curator Óscar Alonso Molina. Before finishing his degree he started working with the Ángeles Baños Gallery, where under the title “Los animales y las cosas” he held his first solo exhibition. He has exhibited in contemporary art fairs such as ARCO, JUSTMAD, MASQUELIBROS or ARTELISBOA. Starting from a reflection about the animal kingdom and from that extend zoology dichotomy vs civilization ( part of the repercussion in the context of the cultural contemporary debate) the work that he is developing in the last years revolves around a ecologic note of declared semiotic dimensions, where the concepts of “perversion” and “irony” are conjugated by postulating a critical statement that narrate some conflictive situations about the invasive (and colonial) human presence in the natural ambit. The result of all this is a cartography of paradoxical images and in the same time visual traps, where it establishes a game with that line of ambiguity between what we know and what we do not know, between what is real and what only seems. His works, in short, is a synthesis (according to my particular way of seeing) of mechanisms and strategies that are distorted in the triad of reality-fiction and simulacrum.