Guillermo Fornes (Bilbao, 1964) earned a degree in Psychology from Cardenal Cisneros University in Madrid in 1990 and Fine Arts at King’s College London. During his seven-year stay in the United Kingdom he set up his first studio in London and interacted with the local art community. He then moved across the globe, living in different cities around the world and opening studios in Hamburg, Benares, and Madrid. These experiences forged a cosmopolitan and intercultural artist whose work is based on his familiarity with different European and Eastern cultures.
Fornes’s early work at the BilbaoArte Foundation involved a large degree of experimentation with new painting techniques, something he continued to explore after his collaboration with the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao.
His works are inscribed with a poetics wherein expressive elements from traditional Eastern painting combine with neo-expressionist gestures, both interpreted from a conceptual aesthetics that reflects on the mechanisms of the language found in the expressive dynamics of contemporary art.
Discursively, his oeuvre—whose vocation is humanistic—reflects on the relationship between history, habitation, and material and spiritual culture as a support for an expanded pictorial subjectivity that aspires to extend the mechanisms of our perception in a world fractured by the extreme specificity of different spheres of knowledge.
In an oeuvre informed by symbolism and synthesis, the gesturality and expressive capacity of blotches contrast with the power of color. Opposites in dialogue with each other determine the conception of these deep paintings with profound messages, characterized by naturalness and an unpresumptuous poetics without intellectually distancing barriers.
In short, his work lies between antiquity and modernity and manages to convey its expressive and poetic charge through its own transparent, subtle gestural resources. Interested in experimentation and research into new supports and approaches, he carries out experimental work in expanded painting and Landart.
Fornes’s oeuvre has been exhibited in America and Europe, and is represented in major public and private collections, institutions and foundations.
Work in Private and Public Collections and Foundations:
Colección Olufsen
Colección Galdón Bruganola
Fundación Pablo Horstman
Fundación Alcazar
Fundación Fabian Fryns
Colección AENA
Colección Antonio Hernández Calleja
Fundación Nuevo Mundo
Fundación Pons
Colección Matt Scout
Fundación Franco Carreño
Centro de Arte Moderno y contemporáneo de Castilla- la Mancha
Fundación Deutsche Stiftung
Biblioteca Nacional
Colección Vivanco
Archivo de Grabado Contemporáneo, Madrid
Casa de la Moneda
Calcográfico Nacional
Colección Roberto Polo
Colección Credit Agricole
Colección BNP
Fundación Kaiku
Colección UNICEF
Fundación BBK
Colección FEVE
Ministerio de Transportes
Fundación Telefónica