Alejandro Corujeira Argentinian, b. 1961

Born in Argentina, Alejandro Corujeira studied at the School of Fine Arts in Buenos Aires before moving to Madrid in 1991. In the same year, he was the youngest artist included in the ground-breaking exhibition El Taller Torres Garcia: The School of the South, curated by Mari Carmen Ramirez at the Huntington Art Gallery. Although his practise is anchored in pre-Columbian Abstraction and an interest in anchoring spirituality and knowledge in a material form, over time Corujeira has taken a step beyond geometric abstraction and pursued work that is immersed in Japanese poetry and minimalist classical music.

Combining acrylic, pencil, graphite and watercolour, Corujeira’s lines undulate and intersect over fields of colour to form cellular silhouettes. Through thinning slow-drying acyclic paint and applying it gradually to the canvas in successive layers, Corujeira creates weightless forms of diaphanous colour. With these few elements, his work captures a sense of rhythmic and palpitating movement in an effort to approach a communion with silence and create an experience of absolute contemplation for the viewer. In an interview with Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro for the Sao Paulo Bienal in 2018, he explained the influence of the musicians John Cage and Iannis Xenakis on how his work can be read as melodies, harmonies, and rhythms superimposed upon the canvas. For Corujeira, abstraction is musical, and music is abstraction. He frequently uses one to inspire the other, and this approach results in meditative works characterized by intricately calculated rhythms and textural fields that invite close inspection.

Corujeira’s work is held in numerous public collections, including: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; the Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, Texas; Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires (MAMBA), Argentina and the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection, New York. Corujeira was one of eight artists commissioned to produce an individual project for the 33^rd Bienal de São Paulo in 2018. His work has been included in important surveys of Latin American art, including NeoPost at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Buenos Aires (2021), Then & Now: Abstraction in Latin American art, 1950 to Present, Deutsche Bank, New York (2010) and El Taller Torres Garcia: The School of the South (1991).

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