Albano Hérnandez
About
Albano Hérnandez (b.1988, Ávila, Spain) lives and works in Cambridge, England. He holds a Master of Painting from the Royal College of Art in 2022 and a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Complutense University of Madrid, UCM. The Basil H. Alkazzi Fellowship Award sponsored his work at RCA where he won a 2022 Hine Painting Award. In 2012 Albano won the BMW Picture Award and three years later the Obra Abierta Award.
My practice, born out of imaginary thoughts and based mainly on ceramic works, has a trans-category status. My daily life is a constant game of dilemmas in which a labor-intensive practice is mixed with industrial processes, where destruction is as important as making, and pollution is as important as purity. In these processes, I follow a circular economy policy that allows me to reduce the amount of waste generated, establish dialogue between different businesses, and create a more flexible and sustainable practice.
My latest paintings are made up of fragments of a brush stroke. The first step in this process is to create a brushstroke with air-drying clay. After the brushstroke dries a bit, I use an electric food slicer to mechanically separate it and display it left to right, top to bottom, according to the natural reading order of western cultures. The resulting object perhaps produces an image that pushes the viewer to question what it means to paint a painting, how matter is presented in the contemporary world, the perception of ordinary consumption, a different way of seeing, anything or nothing.
His most recent solo exhibitions have taken place at the Salvador Victoria Museum (Spain), Collège d'Espagne (France), Fundación Iturria (Uruguay) and Cambridge University (England).
Albano's work includes Ministerio de Asuntos Exteriores y Cooperación (Spain), Collège d'Espagne de Paris (France), Fundaçao José Saramago (Portugal), Fundaçao António Prates (Portugal), Fundación Iturria (Uruguay), Fundación Ankaria (Spain), Ars Citerior Collection (Spain) is part of public and private collections of the National Library of Spain, BMW Ibérica (Spain-Portugal), FundaciónVenancio Blanco (Spain), University of Cambridge (UK) and UBS Europe SE (Spain).
