Mikel Pinto Muñoz Finalist for the 2021 award

Mikel Pinto Muñoz: Finalist for the 2021 award

Madrid resident painter in the Chamberí area, a stately residential area with a variety of cultural attractions, including the Sorolla Museum and Art Gallery.

Mikel has been painting all his life, since his father is a painter and he had the opportunity to experience the profession and his passion for art since he was a child, in his own home. During adolescence he abandoned painting when he was disappointed with the current state of the art and focused on studying literature, which led him to graduate in English Philology from the Compultense University of Madrid.

During his university training, he regained his love for painting by visiting the Prado Museum regularly and decided to start an artistic career.

Before leaving painting during adolescence, he had the opportunity to win several outdoor painting awards, such as the 2010 edition of the Goya open-air competition in the city of Bilbao, of which he won the first prize when he was just 15 years old.

‘My work is titled 'The Last of the Council'. It is a canvas measuring two meters by two meters, painted in oil, and made with a loose technique, with expressive glazes and brushstrokes. The painting

represents a group of very young priests walking together while passing through an orange, twilight background, among whose turbulences the historical drift of an in- stitution as influential as the Catholic Church can be distinguished. In some way, the picture is based on the contrast between this historical drift and the incipient faith of those young priests, hardly aware of what the weight of this drift entails in the face of materialism, the lack of transcendence and the antimetaphysical character of the modern western societies.’

Why did you choose just that work?

‘Because I think it represents an interesting and unusual contrast.’

Mikel has several projects, although he cannot talk about all of them. His main project is to continue standing for the many daily paradoxes of postmodernity, in which so habitually, as the song said, ‘you can see a Bible crying next to a water heater.’

What would you say to your readers?

‘That they continue to be in- terested in art, but that they also do not forget their roots, of Greece, Rome, the Romanesque, the Gothic, the Renaissance or the Baroque.’