Alberto Peral

Alberto Peral (Santurce, 1966) graduated in Fine Arts at the UPV (University of the Basque Country), and later took several courses at Arteleku directed by Ángel Bados. He belongs to the generation of artists that emerged at the beginning of the nineties in the Basque Country driven by the effervescence of Arteleku. After this period he spent a year at the Spanish Academy in Rome and later moved to Barcelona, where he still lives today.

Since his first important exhibition together with Ana Laura Aláez at the Espai 13 of the Joan Miró Foundation in Barcelona in 1992, his work has shown a desire for formal experimentation that has led him to move through a wide range of media, from drawing, photography and sculpture to installation and video. In his work he proposes a poetic encounter between the simplest and most essential forms and the symbolic power they contain.

He incorporates into his language the contributions of the classical avant-garde with regard to form; he discovers the formal essence in nature and culture as manifestations of a universal order. Ovoid shapes as a germinal symbol, circularity, rotation, light, colour and the surface of materials are fundamental elements with which he constructs a poetics of form and spatio-temporal meaning, which he unfolds in multiple directions and expands with experiences from other places through trips to Mexico, India, Brazil, Venezuela, Japan and the main European countries.

In 2009, together with Sinéad Spelman, he founded HALFHOUSE, a non-profit space that continues to this day, where he has programmed solo exhibitions over the last 15 years of national and international artists, workshops, conferences and artist residencies.
His work has been seen in centres such as the Reina Sofía, the Irish Museum of Modern Art (Dublin) and the Hamburger Bahnhof (Berlin), and he has also been invited to speak about his work at the Tate Modern (London). He is part of the main collections of contemporary Spanish art such as the Reina Sofía, Banco de España, Artium, la Caixa, Banc Sabadell, Centro de Arte Alcobendas, Fundación Botín, Unión Fenosa, Fundación Helga de Alvear or Macba among others.