NACHO ZUBELZU. Nómada

13/12/2019

METRO GALLERY presents NÓMADA, an exhibition project that wants to introduce for the first time in Galicia the work of the artist NACHO ZUBELZU (Reinosa, 1966, recently awarded as the Best Cantabrian Artist by the Cantabrian Government. Nature and the emotional experiences that the earth and its elements produce in him constitute the basis of his work, pledged with sustainability and to the preservation of ancestral ways of life based on the balance between the human being and his natural environment.

From his Valle del Campoo in Cantabria, Zubelzu has been traveling to African countries such as Kenia or Gambia, and Asian countries such as China, Mongolia or Vietnam, or to places of overflowing nature like the Atacama Desert in Chile or the Andes. Another of his closest landmarks is the transhumance, which he practices twice a year with nomadic shepherds from Extremadura and Andalusia driving sheep and cows through the ravines in search of the two springs. All of this inspires his work, a work that captures the profile and the trace, the essence of nature and human beings and that connects him spiritually with the people who live in harmony with their natural environment. In this interaction with the world and its inhabitants lies the key to the creations of this artist and astute anthropologist who manages to capture his experiences through the subtlety of his compositions and the virtuosity of his drawing.

Throughout his trajectory, sculpture, drawing, painting, photography and performance form a hole. His manual work is technical, precise and sturdy, and is under serves the need to count, communicate and, as well as, to change the way we look at a world so devastatingly exploited and disconnected from the essential.

In this exhibition we can enjoy three series recently made and interconnected between them. On the one hand, Movimientos nómadas, a work in which he has been working on for the last few years with hand-cut paper and that was born from his own experiences in transhumance. The pencil drawing is the main character of the series named Estacas and Neveros. Stakes burned in long nights around the fire are a representation of the nomadic way of life in which he participated so many times and in so many places. The Neveros are projected as a interpretation of the language of the territory, deciphering the folds sewn into the relief, in his own words ?an aerial representation of organic and botanical rhythms with nature as inspiration, not only landscape but adopting the order that prevails in it.

He has been awarded with important distinctions for his work, including the First Prize in Drawing Antonio del Rincón de Guadalajara, the First Prize in Painting Casimiro Sainz de Reinosa, the First Prize in the Lino Casimiro Iborra Painting Competition in Santoña, the First Prize in Drawing Antonio Revelles in Colmenar Viejo, the First Prize in Research into Rural Cultures Cabuérniga in Cabezón de la Sal and an Honourable Mention in the Caja España Painting Prize. Besides, he has had numerous individual and collective exhibitions in Spain, China, Italy, Portugal, Luxembourg and Germany and his works form part of important public and private collections.