Juan Correa
Madrid 1959

Juan Correa studied at the School of Arts and Crafts and at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando, both in Madrid. Ever since his first solo exhibitions in the late 1980s, his work has explored the concept of time through material abstraction. The pure pigments, gypsums, powdered marble and primers that he uses are subjected to quartering and stripping processes that reveal or conceal figurative elements which usually refer to the classical past (including specific references to the paintings in Pompeii and the work of Claude Lorrain) in a sort of pictorial palimpsest as an expression of time, memory and forgetting. In his most recent series, figurative elements are almost entirely absent and more prominence is given to patches of colour, sometimes with dotted elements as preliminary sketches on the canvas. In 2014 he incorporated tesserae, with Eastern-style plant motifs and stronger, contrasting colours.

Since his first solo exhibition at the Cultural Centre in Alcobendas (Madrid, 1984), he has exhibited continually at galleries across Spain, including numerous solo shows at the Marlborough galleries in Madrid and Barcelona from 2008 onwards, and has appeared in collective exhibitions at the same organisation's venues in New York and Monaco.

Roberto Díaz