Alberto Pina
Alberto Pina
Alberto Pina was born in Athens in 1971. His interest in drawing and painting started at a very young age. In 1994 he finished his degree in Fine Arts at the University Complutense of Madrid. During the years of training, Francisco Cortijo, a teacher who taught him the pleasure for a personal and careful work within a figurative style, exerted the most important influence on Pina´s artistic ideas. Having completed his academic studies, and after a few years of independent professional experience, Pina spent the academic year 2002-2003 in the Academy of Spain in Rome. In 2003 he was awarded with the Mariano Fortuny fellowship and spent three months painting in Venice. At the end of his stay in Venice, the Venetian Bugno Art Gallery made Pina´s oil paintings subject of a solo exhibition.
After returning to Spain, Pina has developed an intense artistic activity in his studio in Madrid. Since then, his paintings and etchings are regularly exhibited in Madrid in the Utopia Parkway Art Gallery. Private collections and public institutions also house numerous works by Pina (e.g. Municipal Museum of Madrid, Contemporary Art Museum Unión FENOSA of A Coruña, Municipal Museum of Albacete). Prominent artists and art critics, such as the Realist painter Antonio López, the ex-curators of the Reina Sofía Museum of Contemporary Art Carlos Pérez and Juan Manuel Bonet, the director of the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid Guillermo Solana, and the writer and art curator Enrique Andrés Ruiz have publically recognized and admired the artistic value of Pina´s works.
The pictorial work by Pina includes portraits, still lifes, landscapes and urban views. While portraits of the artist´s relatives and friends are highly psychological, Pina´s still lifes show a perfect geometrical equilibrium in which a metaphysical intention, similar to that of some pictures by Di Chirico, coexists with a serene melancholy. But where Pina really shows all his philosophical and aesthetic ideas is in his landscapes and urban views. These paintings represent large and lonely spaces where the presence of human figures is only occasional. Although the views of bridges, streets, abandoned buildings and suburbs by Pina might resemble some paintings by Edward Hopper, a more thorough observation reveals a fundamental difference. While Hopper usually emphasized the inhospitable and desolate features of urban areas, Pina shows the quotidian life behind them, as if people just had left the scene that we are observing. As the art critic Carlos Pérez has already highlighted, this reflects Pina´s obsession for showing the reality in his wide and conventional normality, which is somehow inherited from the German New Objectivity.
