David Lechuga
Madrid 1950

David Lechuga trained as a sculptor and painter at the Madrid Arts & Crafts School. In 1973 he was awarded a grant from the Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid to extend his studies at the Hoger Instituut voor Schone Kunsten in Antwerp, Belgium. In 1978 he obtained a grant from the Juan March Foundation and the following year a grant for Promotion of and Research into Plastic Arts in New Forms of Expression, awarded by the Ministry of Culture. His experience led him to conduct an in-depth study of modelling, carving, casting and the use of resin and concrete, which he worked into his artworks from the 1970s onwards, in embryonic organic shapes. In the 1980s his sculptures became anthropomorphic and he began to use forms of winged insects, tending towards the totemic. These sculptures, made mainly of carved, assembled, polychromed wood, contain hints of primitivism and early cubism, with groups of figures that feature dialogues laden with violence and eroticism, in a blend of the everyday and the ancestral that is not without irony. In the 1990s he produced a number of works in wood and polychromed recycled materials, leaning towards two-dimensional pictorial art.

He has received numerous awards, including the National Sculpture Award in Valladolid (1989) and First Prize in the 19th Caja de Madrid National Sculpture Contest (1995). He staged his first solo exhibition in 1970, and since then has held stand-out shows at the Santander Municipal Museum of Fine Art (1983) and the Barjola Museum (Gijón, 1993), and has taken part in events including the Alexandria Biennial (1991) and the Cairo Biennial (1997).

Roberto Díaz