"I am interested in addressing issues related to painting such as scale, light, color, darkness, and surface."
Miguel Marina, 2022
The artistic practice of Miguel Marina unfolds as a sustained exercise of research around painting, conceived as an open, relational, and materially situated process. His work, centered on the exploration of the structural elements of pictorial language—light, color, scale, surface, matter—maintains an active and constitutive relationship with the environment, understood as a continuous source of perceptual and conceptual construction.
Each work emerges from the previous ones and anticipates those to come, tracing a dynamic of continuity, deepening, and displacement. This logic, at times fragmented, generates formal and discursive leaps that share a common axis: a reflection on modes of making, on materiality, and on the artist's everyday relationship with the objects and contexts he inhabits. Marina's practice can be read as a form of rhythmically progressive narration that takes the awareness of the act of painting as an epistemological point of departure.
His approach to the pictorial is articulated from a phenomenological and dialectical perspective, in the tension between image and matter. The result is a body of work that, despite the diversity of techniques and formats, maintains an internal coherence sustained by a poetics of process, a permanent attention to place, and a constant questioning of the limits and possibilities of painting as a form of knowledge.
Holder of a degree in Fine Arts from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, he furthered his training at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Bologna. He has undertaken residencies at the Casa de Velázquez (Madrid, 2013), Piramidón Centre d'Art Contemporani (Barcelona, 2016), the Real Academia de España en Roma (2017–2018), and Fundación BilbaoArte (Bilbao, 2019). His work has been presented in institutional exhibitions including Una historia del arte reciente (1960–2020) at the Fundación Juan March (Cuenca, 2021), Pintura: una renovación permanente at the Museo Patio Herreriano (Valladolid, 2021), Generación 2020 at La Casa Encendida (Madrid, 2020), and the solo exhibition A veces pasa, curated by Ángel Calvo Ulloa, at Centro Párraga (Murcia, 2023). In 2024 he was awarded the Premio ARCO Comunidad de Madrid, with his work entering the collection of the Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo. He currently presents Hasta aquí, his first solo exhibition in a national museum, curated by Javier Hontoria at the Museo Patio Herreriano (Valladolid, 18 October 2025 – 8 March 2026). His work is held in collections including Colección DKV, Colección MICA, the International Contemporary Painting Collection of the Fundación Barrié, and the collection of the Museo Patio Herreriano.