Project director: Enrique Martínez Goikoetxea

List of works Brochure Text by Jaime Cuenca (catalogue) Text by Santiago Arcediano (catalogue) Texts in the gallery Dossier (Library)

The Xuxurlaka (In Whispers) exhibition presents a selection of around 30 of the most recent works produced by Juan Mieg, all of them large-format pieces that are a faithful reflection of the oeuvre of this artist, one of the most established representatives of contemporary Basque painting.

Mieg's passionate commitment to his chosen artistic discipline is evident in his intuitive painting, a highly individual psychological self-portrait born of internal processes. There have been few noticeable changes in direction over the course of his long career, which is instead an ongoing, almost obsessive process of exploration: painting employed as a tool of knowledge, the technique itself as a code of communication that has never given way to stridency at any point in the more than 50 years he has been working as an artist; painting as a vehicle for self-knowledge and for accessing one's inner nature which, once the—particular and limited—subconscious has been overcome, allows entry into a universal space, the vast collective unconscious.

With his austere method of working, Mieg has recorded a coherent and defined language that isolates in whispers images of the unconscious, a process in which his profound knowledge of painting acquires value and presence. His treatment of the surfaces, textures, chromatic arrays, tensions between the masses of colour and open spaces is evidence of his considerable understanding of painting, as he fills his work with energy and opens a channel to the spectator's subconscious, suggesting readings without forcing them upon him.

Mieg comes to the canvas without a project or sketches and allows the images, rhythms and intensities of his work to flow. The artist and his dialogue with the history of art become tools of the work itself. Thus, as Jaime Cuenca notes in his essay in the catalogue accompanying the exhibition, the artist focuses his effort on avoiding automatisms, learned gestures, thereby enabling himself, after the first blots, to initiate a set of strategies that break with possible schemas he has already produced.

In keeping with the artist's usual practice, the works in the exhibition lack titles and are shown without dates, even though they were created in very recent years or even in the last few weeks. The artist's intention seems to be to sever most of the connections with his work and to isolate it from a particular situation or time, thereby giving total freedom to the spectator's experience at the moment of interpretation.

Juan Mieg was born in Vitoria-Gasteiz in 1938. He started to study architecture in Barcelona but it gave up to devote himself fully to painting in 1962. While in Barcelona, he discovered the surrealist and informalist trends whose working processes and thinking influenced his own pictorial proposals. On his return after a period spent in Paris in 1966, he joined the Orain group together with Joaquín Fraile, Carmelo Ortíz de Elgea, Alberto Schommer and the sculptor Jesús Echeverría. The Gaur, Hemen and Danok groups also formed at the same time in the other Basque provinces. The founding of all these circles was underpinned by the same set of concerns and they shared a commitment to ensuring that culture became directly involved in society and to connecting the Basque School with the international avant-garde. Mieg currently lives and works in Vitoria-Gasteiz.

Paraleloan / En paralelo / In Parallel is the name of the project that encompasses two new exhibitions produced by Artium: Juan Mieg. Xuxurlaka and Luis Gordillo XXL/XXI, which will be open to the public from 9 April to 24 August 2014.

This programme and the works on display stem from a desire to bring together in the same time and place artists engaged in the ‘paradise lost' of painting, producing works that have provided art criticism with matter for discussion, making a notable contribution to the renewal of artistic languages, and continuing to employ the same creative energy in their endeavours. Among its various aims, the project is intended to recontextualise and to raise the appreciation of a technique that seems, within the context of contemporary creation, to have lost the aesthetic status it once had over the course of history. A technique which, though traditional, bears no relation to the academic and which has retained intact its ability to suggest a natural, intimate (perhaps even erotic) relationship between the artist and the creative act and between the work and the public. In addition, the intention is to encourage reflection on the artistic context itself, in which discourse frequently supplants the object, to call attention to the sensory experience of the physical reality of painting.

These two artists were born in the 1930s and belong to a generation that felt the same need to overcome the academic languages of the time. Their careers have run in parallel and, while they may have opted for different aesthetics, they continue to share the same urge to create in a dialogue, face to face, with contemporaneity.