Inaki de la Fuente Art for Sale at Auction

b. 1954 -

Born in Bilbao in a working-class family, Iñaki de la Fuente started off as a self-taught artist by continually practising drawing. From a very early age he frequented the Museum of Fine Arts of Bilbao, where he became acquainted with the work of Ignacio Zuloaga (1870-1945) and of Daniel Vázquez Díaz (1882-1969).

In the seventies he entered contact with avant-garde circles. Through the mediation of Agustín Ibarrola (1930), an artist who was to have a profound influence on his career, he joined the cultural movements supported by the Communist Party. In the eighties he was awarded a scholarship by the Ministry of Culture (1980) and another from the Provincial Council of Vizcaya (1983). In 1982 he won First Prize in Painting at the opening edition of the Gure Artea festival created for emerging artists. In 1983 he was appointed as a teacher at the renewed School of Fine Arts of Bilbao, (where he taught for three years) and in 1984 he took part at the Oviedo Biennial. Since 1976 his work had been seen in many solo shows and from 1983 onwards he joined the roster of the Windsor Kulturgintza gallery. In 1996 he had an exhibition at Galerie 17 in Geneva. His work is in the collections of ARTIUM-Centro Museo Vasco de Arte Contemporáneo and Juntas Generales de Vizcaya.

While his work from the seventies (a time when he also created sculptures) was underpinned by social protest, in the eighties it took on a more expressionist overtone, impregnated with a greater sense of theatricality and plasticism. From then on his practice became more focused on a study of painting itself, in a process of research that he continues to date, always looking for new languages and new ways of expressing himself.