Gabriel Díaz
(Spain, 1968)
He lives and works in Madrid. Although he was educated as a sculptor, at the beginning of 1990s Gabriel Díaz appropriated the poetics of land art through interventions in rock or with ice pieces. His origins have an expressive “stripping away” characteristic of the minimal added to the conceptual density of object art and of land art, although also influenced by the ethical-aesthetical ideology of Oteiza.
During his sculptural stage, Gabriel Díaz already combined human and cosmic values pointing at the return to the traditional reciprocity of arts and sciences. Indeed, therein lies one of the artist’s most peculiar features, namely, his will to combine fields of knowledge, to enter into dialogue with disciplines ranging from aesthetics, physics, geology or Zen wisdom. Thus, Gabriel Díaz soon began to explore other artistic media and created his first video in 1999. His first works are shot in caves, caverns, ice grottos or natural water sluices with a view to creating works which combine his preference for nature and the notions of inner/exterior, input/output or empty/full as a metaphor for the artist’s inner pursuit. This is the pursuit which took Gabriel Díaz to Tibet where he found a more categorical concordance between the grandeur of the earth and the essence of the being itself. This journey results in El aliento de Chomolugma, a polyptych featuring the north face of Everest in four different moments configuring a unity with continuously moving clouds and shadows revealing and hiding a dynamics which contrasts with the solid stillness of the mountain. Gabriel Díaz has exhibited in major centres such as MNCARS, Guggenheim Bilbao or Artium in Vitoria. His work is represented in collections such as Fundación La Caixa, Artium, MUSAC, Fundación Caja de Madrid and Fundación AENA, to name a few.
