Usuario:Koala Inconformista/Taller

Iñigo Manterola was born in Orio in 1973.

Biography

He studied at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Bilbao between 1993 and 1998. He was awarded a university degree of Licenciado with a major in painting.

After graduating from university he attended several workshops, which include, on the one hand, the painting workshop MAESTROS DE LA FIGURACIÓN (MASTERS OF FIGURATION), with Antonio López and Juan José Aquerreta, at the Pamplona School of Architecture in 2006, and, on the other hand, a workshop on TEXTURAS (TEXTURES), taught by the Australian artist David Kelly during the AUSTRALIS exhibit at the Donostia-San Sebastian Kubokutxa exhibition room in 2010.

Right from his early childhood, Manterola was interested in drawing and painting. When he was 8 years old, his teacher spoke to his mother and she enrolled him in extracurricular classes. He has not stopped since then and says that this interest in creating will accompany him all throughout his life.

If there is something worth underlining in Iñigo’s professional career, it is his constant and vital evolution. His need to leapfrog stages and to put forward new proposals is tangible. After dedicating some 15 years exclusively to the discipline of painting, he has been incorporating to his projects, little by little, other disciplines such as sculpture, photography and installation, with the intention to continue growing and believing in his work. More than 50 individual exhibitions and 20 collective ones, in cities like Pamplona, San Sebastián, Vitoria, Bilbao, Valencia, Sevilla, Madrid, Barcelona, Biarritz, México D.F., Oporto, Abu Dabi, etc., have witnessed this evolution. And to this end, it is necessary to carry out plastic research and to experiment with different materials. He has recently incorporated resin to shape his pieces and also dibond as a support in his paintings, particularly in the Rtrazo series.

Trajectory

Among his projects it is worth highlighting, in the year 2005, Camino entre dos aguas, de la figuración a la abstracción, (A path between two waters, from figuration to abstraction) a multidisciplinary exhibition that was first shown at the ISPILU gallery of Zarautz and that was taken to Madrid in 2006 to the JOVENART gallery. In 2007, Pinturas Animadas, un mareo en el Cantábrico, (Animated Paintings, Dizziness in the Cantabrian Sea) at the Bilbao 3E gallery. In 2011, Txatxareatzen, together with Gorka Larrañaga, which consisted in both of them making a plastic exercise, with its later exhibition at the LA CASA gallery of Mexico D.F. In 2016, at the POLVORÍN gallery of the Pamplona Citadel, RTRAZO, radiografía de un gesto agonizante, (RTRAZO, radiography of an agonizing gesture) that was later taken to the ENELESTUDIO gallery of San Sebastián.

The single piece policy makes his work acquire a greater importance and endows it with an exclusive spirit.

Another of Manterola’s​ aspects to be highlighted is that he believes in synergies and in the collaborations with other artists and disciplines. He says that in every collaboration or partnership there is a mutual enrichment. This is evident in the exercises with artists such as

Gorka Larrañaga and Samuel Dougados, the UNYON project together with the Jewellers Marfil Joyeros and, more recently, the collaboration with the French Chef Hélenè Darroze, who has been awarded 3 Michelin stars, for whom he has designed the napkin rings of her Paris restaurant where every table displays one of his sculptures. Mutual enrichment is the purpose of these unions.