After studying Fine Arts at the Complutense University of Madrid, José Álvaro Perdices Torres moved to the United States, where he completed a post-graduate course at UCLA. He lived in Los Angeles for twenty years. In 2011 he returned to Spain, where he combined his artistic production with curating contemporary art shows and coordinating exhibitions at the Museo del Prado in Madrid.
His art generates strategies that dissent from training structures and educational methods, calling for free learning that breaks away from the norm and does not produce individuals primed to reproduce the same behaviour patterns over and over again. He uses the word ‘dis-educate’ to describe his efforts to eliminate the hierarchical relations on which our education is based and seek means of dissidence with symbolic value. During his time in Los Angeles he produced pieces that border on collective art, for example by having children from a school complete the productive, critical equation (Pleasure and Legislation, 1999; Jakintza, 1999). These works can be read metaphorically as small cracks in the system. Another element that runs through his work is the Foucauldian concept of the museum as a place for ordering the world and, therefore, for a specific construction of knowledge; he thus pivots spatial structures and explanatory discourses as areas on which statements made as certainties are based, as in his works NEGATED, open and nakeD (Castellón Contemporary Art Space, 2011).
Perdices has staged solo shows at museum and art centres including the Tàpies Foundation (Barcelona, 2013); La Casa Encendida (Madrid, 2004); Egia/ Egia Cultural Centre (Donostia/San Sebastián); and Sin Duda Exhibitions (Los Angeles, United States, 1998). He has received grants and/or prizes from Musashino University (Japan, 2004); Obra Social Caja Madrid Generaciones (Madrid, 2005); the Skadden Foundation for the Arts (New York, 2006); Matadero (Madrid, 2008), the Autonomous Community of Madrid (2007) and the ART Matters Foundation (New York, 2010).
After studying Fine Arts at the Complutense University of Madrid, José Álvaro Perdices Torres moved to the United States, where he completed a post-graduate course at UCLA. He lived in Los Angeles for twenty years. In 2011 he returned to Spain, where he combined his artistic production with curating contemporary art shows and coordinating exhibitions at the Museo del Prado in Madrid.
His art generates strategies that dissent from training structures and educational methods, calling for free learning that breaks away from the norm and does not produce individuals primed to reproduce the same behaviour patterns over and over again. He uses the word ‘dis-educate’ to describe his efforts to eliminate the hierarchical relations on which our education is based and seek means of dissidence with symbolic value. During his time in Los Angeles he produced pieces that border on collective art, for example by having children from a school complete the productive, critical equation (Pleasure and Legislation, 1999; Jakintza, 1999). These works can be read metaphorically as small cracks in the system. Another element that runs through his work is the Foucauldian concept of the museum as a place for ordering the world and, therefore, for a specific construction of knowledge; he thus pivots spatial structures and explanatory discourses as areas on which statements made as certainties are based, as in his works NEGATED, open and nakeD (Castellón Contemporary Art Space, 2011).
Perdices has staged solo shows at museum and art centres including the Tàpies Foundation (Barcelona, 2013); La Casa Encendida (Madrid, 2004); Egia/ Egia Cultural Centre (Donostia/San Sebastián); and Sin Duda Exhibitions (Los Angeles, United States, 1998). He has received grants and/or prizes from Musashino University (Japan, 2004); Obra Social Caja Madrid Generaciones (Madrid, 2005); the Skadden Foundation for the Arts (New York, 2006); Matadero (Madrid, 2008), the Autonomous Community of Madrid (2007) and the ART Matters Foundation (New York, 2010).