Germán Portal Garbarino
Germán Portal, Montevideo (Uruguay) 1979
Period of residence: May 2014 – May 2016
Germán Portal Garbarino has a BA in Fine Arts from Universitat de Barcelona (Spain) and has also completed his studies in Accademia di Belle Arti di Ravenna (Italy).
He has shown individually in 2005 and 2007 in Nuova Icona (Venice, Italy), and has participated in several group shows as CALL2010 at Galeria Luis Adelantado (Valencia), “Atelier de Barcelone” at L.A.C. Lieu d’Art Contemporain (Narbonne, France) in 2013, and Premi Internacional de Pintura Guasch Coranty 2012 at Centre d’Art Tecla Sala (L’Hospitalet, Barcelona).
Recently he has shown individually in Galeria Silvestre (Madrid/Tarragona) and in La Capella, Barcelona.
His practice is focused basically on painting, and in general, his work reflects an interest about the representation and about painting as a media and its relationship with other media, putting in discussion its own condition and its limits.
He commonly works with his own environment and life experience exploring personal and local narratives with particular and universal themes. His painting is also a document, register and record of ephemeral everyday life actions.
He is also interested in a defamiliarization process, and his work plays, through painting, with a distinct combination, alteration and re-situation of elements, connected or unconnected to each other. His work consumes forms and re-programs them precisely in a traditional way, painting.
Therefore, there is at his work a clear inquiry and questioning about the construction of history itself, raised from a deconstruction of it and a research for an alternative story that will bring new meanings and new fields of knowledge.
germanportalgarbarino(at)gmail.com
