Juan Oyarbide

Juan Oyarbide (San Sebastian, 1979) is a London based artist, architect and masterplanner.  He combines his architectural practice with the artistic production of prints and paintings.

His artistic influences stem from the Basque, Spanish and European art traditions.He spent a year in Tokyo (2011) where he explored traditional Japanese arts and joined Heatherwick Studio  where he worked for several international, award-winning projects.

Artistically, for the past eight years, Juan has been working on a single project entitled Exsistine.

Exsistine unravels as a composition of art pieces whose scale ranges from small scale pencil drawings to murals. Focusing on the theme of distortions within human nature, the project negotiates the distance between the anatomical identity of the human body and how it registers in the city as the new natural environment.   Following a selective production of key pieces to complete the Exsistine project that include oil, ink, acrylic, digital production on canvas, timber, and paper, 2018 Juan completed on of his most ambitious painting projects to date, executing an Exsistine composition with acrylics on a large scale 6 x 7.2m canvas. The piece of work was completed in an old derelict building in North London and hung for display inside an industrial pavilion.

Recently he has been working on a high detailed series of ink drawings that take influence from traditional etching technique and represent a mix of characters extracted from different ancient and contemporary mythologies such as Icarus from the Greek myth of Dedalus and Icarus, Mari from the Basque mythology, along with Superuser from the highly profiled coders of the tech Californian giants and the Chinese myth of the frogs as masters of spells.

For more information visit www.exsistine.com