Angel Vergara

Spanish, b. 1958

Angel Vergara is born in 1958 in Mieres, Spain. Vergara grew up in Brussels, Belgium, where he still lives and works. He followed his education at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts and the Ecole de Recherche Graphique. In 2011 the artist represented Belgium during the Venice Bienniale

Vergara's body of work contains a wide range of media and disciplines, including performance, drawing, painting, video, film and installation. Especially audiovisual material makes up a substantial part of Vergara's work: the material deals with performance recordings, parts of video and other installations, and autonomous film and video work. For many years, these different media allow the artist to explore and broaden the limitations of art both from an aesthetic and socio-political perspective. A continuous cross-fertilization between art and life is a major constant, with additional focus on the particularity of the position an artist can take today. Vergara's body of work develops on the basis of a fascination with and research into the relationships maintained by the power of images vis-à-vis the broader socio-cultural context

During his career, Vergara shows an approach to action painting. The more recent works of Vergara make use of film and video and it is through this flux or stream of images that he creates or renders possible "live paintings", a painting that is created in sync with the flow of images on the screen. The same gesture takes place within a mediatized reality when the artist appropriates existing images. His assertion of his position as a painter is nothing more than an abstract concept: when he interacts with reality, he often occupies an economic and social function though which he seeks to explore the limits of the role of the artist. All of this makes Angel Vergara's work pre-eminently contextual, without this endangering the subjective input of the artist