“Its good to be back”: Secundino Hernández
Secundino Hernández, “It’s good to be back”, 199 x 344 cm
Courtesy the artist
29 April bis 31 Juli 2022
Opening ours during Gallery Weekend:
Friday, 29.04.2022: 12-18 Uhr
Saturday, 30.04.2022: 12-18 Uhr
Sunday, 01.05.2022: 12-18 Uhr
The Miettinen Collection is pleased to present the solo exhibition „It’s good to be back“ by Spanish painter Secundino Hernández (b. 1975 in Madrid) at the Miettinen Collection from April 29 to July 31, 2022. It’s been almost fifteen years since Timo Miettinen and Secundino Hernández met. The collector discovered the talent of the young painter early on, began to support him and buy his paintings for his own collection. For a few years, Hernández even lived and worked in the house at Marburger Straße 3, which is now home to the Miettinen Collection and where he also presented his first solo exhibition in Germany in 2013.
A lot has happened in the meantime. Hernández has become a well-known painter. He exhibits in museums all over the world and has since returned to his homeland in Madrid. The contact and friendship between artist and collector has always existed and Secundino Hernández has a permanent place in the Miettinen Collection. After almost ten years he is returning to his beginnings in Berlin. This is why „It’s good to be back“ reflects on the bond between the two of them with a selection of around 50 works from the Miettinen Collection and never shown works from the artist’s private collection.
At the same time, the exhibition provides comprehensive insights into the painterly practice of Secundino Hernández. With inexhaustible urge, he explores the possibilities of abstract painting and expands them with his own, unconventional techniques and the resulting worlds of experience. The result of this approach is an oeuvre that, instead of being reduced to a one-dimensional denominator, is much more characterized by its dazzling diversity.
Again and again he tests the pictorial possibilities of his painterly means. In this way, Hernández shows us viewers how complex forms and scripts arise from simple lines, how minimalist, colorfully reserved compositions alternate with impasto, proliferating, colorful ones, which playfully cross the border to the relief and thus to the sculptural. Equally, in the works, sophisticated calculation meets the suspension of any control, so that some pictorial inventions are left to the coincidence of the chemical processes.
In addition, one discovers numerous references and influences of art-historical models, such as in the series Lupis Ipsum (2013), which takes El Greco’s depictions of the twelve apostles and Jesus Christ as a starting point and transforms them into abstract pictorial worlds that emulate the compositions of the Mannerist painter from our present. But also influences of modern painting are omnipresent in Hernandez’s works, blending old masters with cutting edge and contemporary narratives.
Visits and guided tours are possible every Saturday between 12:00 and 18:00.To ensure a safe visit for all, we follow the current hygiene regulations and ask you to wear a masks and to keep the safety distance of 1.5 m.