Juan María Sukilbide

JUAN MARIA SUKILBIDE (Pamplona, 1961).
Untitled. 2024.
Mixed media on canvas.
Certificate of authenticity attached.
Measurements: 55 x 38 cm.

Painter and coordinator of artistic workshops. He has participated in group exhibitions at the Museum Gustavo de Maeztu (repeatedly), in Marburger- Frankfurter Kunst-Supermarkt. Germany. Switzerland 2000; Juan Manuel Lumbreras Gallery 2004; Samuel Gallery, Valladolid 2005; Convento de Sao Paulo, Portugal 2009; Palacio de la Serna, Ciudad Real 2009; Quattro Gallery, Leiria 2010; Ciudadela de Pamplona 2013.... He has held solo exhibitions in Ciudadela Pamplona 2014; Sala Okendo, San Sebastian 2011; Zizur, Navarra 2010, Gustavo de Maeztu Museum 2007; Castel Ruiz Center, Tudela, among others. Awarded on several occasions: Third Prize Outdoor Painting in Estella 99; First Prize Painting Contest Diario de Noticias 99; Second Prize II Outdoor Painting Contest in Pamplona; Fourth Prize "Sport and Art" Government of Navarra; First Prize Painting Contest of Aoiz; Scholarship Aid to Plastic Creation 1993, among others. Many of Juan Mª Sukilbide's paintings remind us of the spontaneous creations of artists labeled as paradigmatic of "art brut" or "outsider art". The "horror vacui" of Carlo Zinelli's or Adolf Wölfli's drawings, based on labyrinthine iterations or mosaics that leave no room for emptiness, are comparable to Sukilbide's colorful compositions. They often look like pagan stained-glass windows or oriental tapestries where figures reduced to elementary forms, to primordial ideograms, unfold particular microworlds. But if in the work of those marginal artists the horror vacui translated the fear of the abyss, the terror of emptiness, for Juan Mª this loquacious expression conveys his way of feeling nature in its festive exuberance.