Joseba eskubi biography channel

Joseba Eskubi (b. 1967) lives and works in Bilbao, Spain, where he teaches painting at the Academy of Fine Arts (University of the Basque Country). He paints in an attic studio near Bilbao’s Guggenheim Museum, producing his distinctive oil paintings on paper linen and canvas. He has shown extensively across Europe and the US and is currently included in an important group exhibition in St. Petersburg Russia. His work was presented at Volta NY 2017 by Knight Webb Gallery of Brixton UK.

Eskubi works with found images and the history of painting, using material and formal elements to confound the ideas of object and person. His solitary elements inhabit rich dark worlds with a sense  of visceral presence, striding through ominous yet 

His works are diminutive and introspective, with more than a touch of pathos.The work demonstrates Eskubi’s fascination with art history, especially the old Spanish masters Goya and Velasquez. His working process is fast, generating a prolific, almost obsessive output. These paintings remind us of their historical inspiration, without actually defining what that inspiration is.

Eskubi combines oil painting with other mixed media processes, building up layers which emphasise the material substance of the image. His soft and amorphous forms are part of a more sensorial narrative behind each work.; these forms writhe like pulsating organs torn from living creatures.

Floating between abstraction and figuration, the bleak landscapes behind his subjects relate to the ‘Black’ paintings of Goya. Perhaps we can also glimpse a mystical world reminiscent of Hieronymus Bosch. The red, violet and rose hues within Eskubi’s work are also reminiscent of Francis Bacon and Philip Guston. These paintings remind us of their historical inspiration, without actually defining what that inspiration is.

'An important part of my work is a small intervention on the paintings of others. I try to distort the borrowed forms, introducing ruptures, jets and folds. The figures twist, the colour becomes saturated ... sometimes the original image is buried under a new network of meanings.These works can be considered as collages where the scissors are replaced by the brushes themselves.’