Juana González
Juana González (Puertollano, 1972) graduated in Fine Arts from the Complutense University of Madrid (2005). She works in the field of painting and drawing.
Her paintings are staged in baroque composition, with a language that moves between surrealism and expressionism within narrative figuration. Each work is a battle and a search for balance between figuration and painting itself, without limiting itself to what is represented, giving prominence to color, brushstrokes, drips, and impasto.
Her work has been shown in various institutional spaces such as the Sala Robayera (Cantabria), the Alcobendas Art Center, the Cervantes Institute (Munich), the Santa Catalina Church in Badajoz, the University of Alicante Museum, and the Musée des Beaux-Arts in La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland.
She has been recognized with the Best Spanish Artist award at the ARCO 2025 fair by Artepuntoes Magazine of the Institute of Contemporary Art (IAC), the 34th López Villaseñor Prize for Plastic Arts (2025), an honorable mention at the ABC Painting and Photography Awards (2003), the Contemporary Art Encounters of the Juan Gil-Albert Institute of Culture in Alicante (2012), among others.
She has participated in various national and international art fairs such as ARCO, UNTITLED, PINTA (Miami), Estampa, Urvanity, JustMad, Drawing Room, and Arte Santander.
Her work forms part of collections such as the Solo Collection, the Oliva Arauna Collection, the Government of Cantabria Collection, the KELLS Art Collection, the MMAC Ayto Madrid Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Studiolo Foundation, among others.
Artist Statement
I would like my work not to need a lot of explanatory support to function. For me, a work of art is an autonomous entity that transmits or communicates emotions, information, knowledge, etc.
I always try to maintain the mystery and create states of confusion and uncertainty. These sensations are very real to me, because life puts you in states of uncertainty constantly. And, of course, my taste for the dark, grotesque and hard makes me find a certain joy in these states of confusion and uncertainty that I try to create.
My paintings are stagings of somewhat baroque composition. Scenarios in which the characters are involved in a story. There is narration, but incomplete. They are fragments of a story in which I don't know exactly what is happening, and I don't want to know either. I wish to remain in that state of confusion and bewilderment that contemplation of a mysterious scene can provoke.
Nor are they absolute nonsense. That does not interest me. I consider that there are enough elements to build possible narratives, depending on one's way of looking. In this way the spectator enters into the game of trying to read the meaning, to understand or to discover.
My battle in each work consists of maintaining the greatest possible balance between two forces, which I also aim to make as powerful as possible: its narrative content (the story told by each work) and the purely formal aspect, the painting itself without the support of content (the brushstrokes, drips, and impasto of the paint, the color, etc.).
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