Sierras I, II, III, IV

Antonio Murado paints realistic settings disrupted by blocks of bold, bright colors. From a distance, the work in his Sierras series appears to depict photorealist scenes. When viewed closely, the rural landscape dissolves entirely and the bright swaths of paint interrupt the perceived narrative and the viewer’s expectations.

Murado is interested in the idea that our eye seeks recognizable forms, creating a visual narrative where there are only brushstrokes. The addition of bold, vivid bands into his nineteenth-century landscape paintings blends abstraction with representation to disrupt the expected narrative and engage the eye. Speaking about art, Murado says, “We have this tendency to read things, to read everything into things that we understand.”

Born in Lugo, Spain, Murado is now based in New York City. His artwork has been shown around the world, including in Spain, Germany, Australia, Switzerland, Portugal, Belgium, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States. Murado likes to experiment with a variety of techniques and source materials. His paintings often depict abstracted landscapes and flowers, and are characterized by their layered, impastoed surface and continued experimentation with the properties of paint and varnishes. In a review by The New York Times, who called Murado “a clever and facile abstract painter,” his work was described as having “an undeniably appealing elegance.” In Artforum, Murado’s art was characterized as falling “between abstraction and representation, between materiality and vista… This meticulously constructed ambiguity affords us a space for sensorial and speculative freedom.”

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