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Garcia de Marina was born in 1975 in Gijón, Spain and currently lives and works in Gijón. He is best known as a conceptual photographer and one of Spain’s leading visual poets. Over the past decade, García de Marina has developed an extensive practice, honing a unique visual vocabulary of photographed assemblages in which he combines disparate everyday objects to analyse the construction and limits of language.
Combining surrealist poetics with a minimal aesthetic, García de Marina’s work challenges conventional understandings by re-contextualising familiar objects like mirrors, pencils, padlocks, cutlery and clocks, stripping away their functionality by placing them in unexpected combinations to construct new meaning. By leaving each work untitled, de Marina welcomes free interpretation, provoking dialogue between the work and the viewer in which the idea offered is allowed to form in the mind of the observer.
Viewing the past through a surrealist lens, García de Marina’s interest in the relationship between language and the visual world emerges from his examination of the literary, artistic and political histories of Europe, in which he makes reference to Cervantes’ Don Quijote, Raymond Queneau’s Exercises of Style (1945) and the fascist regime of Generalissimo Franco.
Garcia de Maria’s work has been featured in many international photography magazines and presented in many international solo exhibitions. In 2018, Dialo 2, Barjola Museum, Gijón, presented García de Marina’s photographs alongside the work of Catalan poet, playwright, graphic designer and visual artist Joan Brossa (1919-1998). To critical acclaim, one of his photographs, a globe with a gas mask over it, was issued as a national postage stamp in Spain in 2021.
A selection of recent solo and group shows include: Museum de Arte Contemporary, St Petersburg, Russia, (2024, 2021); Footprint, symbol and interior landscape, National Museum of Fine Arts, Havana, Cuba (2024); Chronicles of a Journey, Spanish Embassy, Brussels (2023); Innocents, El Liceo, Cultural Space, Navia (2023); Chronicles of a Journey, Old Institute Cultural Centre, Gijón, Spain (2023); The Unfinished Word, Instituto Cervantes Lisbon, Portugal (2023); Innocents, University of Szegede, Instituto Cervantes de Budapest, Hungary (2022); Enigmas, Sozo Gallery, North Carolina, USA (2022); In the footsteps of Le Nôtre, Fanxi Delarue Gallery, France (2022); Flo Peters Gallery, Hamburg, Germany (2022); The Unfinished Word, Instituto Cervantes São Paulo, Brazil (2022); Innocentes, Gallery X, Al Majaz Amphitheater Island, Sharjah, United Arab Emirates (2022); Innocentes, Xposure International Photography Festival, Sharjah, United Arab Emirates (2022); Experiences of Wonder: Wonderment, NoonPowell Gallery, Notting Hill, London (2021); Cervantes, Budapest, (2020), Visual Variations: Figurative to Abstract, NoonPowell Gallery, Notting Hill, London (2020); Christmas Exhibition, NoonPowell Gallery, Notting Hill, London (2020); Summer Online Exhibition, NoonPowell Gallery, Notting Hill, London (2020); Cervantes Institute Budapest, Hungary; Innocents (2019); Sala de Exposicones, Alicante, Spain; La Parabra Incabada (2019); Laboral Cuidad de la Cultura, Gijon, Spain; Photographs, Flo Peters Gallery, Hamburg, Germany (2019).
García de Marina - 'Innocents'