Albano Hernández

Albano Hérnandez (b.1988)  Ávila, Spain, lives and works in Cambridge, UK. He graduated from the Royal College of Art in 2022 (MA Painting) and holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Complutense University of Madrid, UCM.  The Basil H. Alkazzi Scholarship Award sponsored his studies at RCA, where he got a distinction and won the Hine Painting Prize 2022. In 2012 Albano won the BMW Painting Prize and the Obra Abierta Award three years later.

"Emanating from pictorial thoughts and based mainly on ceramic works, my practice has a transcategorical condition. My day-to-day is a constant game of dichotomies where a labour- intensive practice is mixed with industrial processes, undoing is as important as making, and impurity is as substantial as purity. In these processes, I follow a circular economy policy that allows me to reduce the amount of waste generated, establish dialogues between different works, and generate a more elastic and sustainable practice.

Fragments of a brushstroke make up my latest paintings. The first step of this process is to create a brushstroke with air-dry clay. Once the brushstroke is almost dried, I use an electric food slicer for fragmenting it mechanically into slices which are displayed in the natural reading order for western cultures, from left to right, top to bottom. The resulting object generates an image that perhaps leads the viewer to question what it means to paint a painting, or how matter is presented in the contemporary world, or the perception of ordinary consumption, or a different way of seeing, anything or not at all."