MIGUEL ANGEL HERNANDO
Biography
Miguel Ángel Hernando was born in Madrid in 1965, and started to attend the Carabanchel Occupational Centre in 1989, where he worked in the ceramic and drawing workshops. Since 2011 he has attended the Debajo del Sombrero workshop in Matadero, Madrid. He attends twice a week, for four hours each time. Whenever someone new comes into the studio, he has a need without exception, to know their birth date and day of the week they were born. It is clear that its meaning hides something that fascinates him. In this way, Hernando shows the same urgency that we all feel to decipher the enigma of time in our lives. This interest in time also manifests in his eagerness to collect calendars and take them everywhere with him. They seem to be much more his property than the clothes that he wears. He can often be found asking others to bring him calendars – but they must be from the current year. He also has a daily ritual of singing the birthday song, which the whole studio has come to accept.
Hernando’s artwork features a world of tiny patterns and imagined animals and figures, arranged around the page. He loves to work in glitter gel pens to create his colourful works. It is believed that he draws things to be admired in heavy detail, but due to his limited speech, the studio cannot be exactly sure what he is drawing. Over time his drawings have increased in their delicacy and in the precision of his detail. Hernando has refined his style of a complicated network of streaks and dots that he uses as decoration on the figures and animals. No one knows just how much detail or ornamentation will feature in a piece of work. The studio views many of the pieces as extravagant works, but love the variation in what he creates. He often repeats the phrase “I paint very well”, so perhaps he feels we do not need to know anymore.
Courtesy of Teresa Isasi, from Debajo del Sombrero studio
Works
Click thumbnails to see larger images and more details. Further works available on request.
Selected Exhibitions
2023 Why We Linger, Darbyshire, London
2023 Outsider Art Fair, Metropolitan Pavilion, New York
2022 RWA 169th Open Exhibiiton, RWA Bristol
2021 Summer Exhibition, Royal Academy of Arts, London
2020 Hybrid Creatures, Jennifer Lauren Gallery online solo exhibition
2020 Art | Unlocked | Unearthed, Jennifer Lauren Gallery online exhibition
2018 Subasta Art U Ready, Residencia Wunderhouse, Madrid
2018 Debajo del Sombrero 10 Years, Galería Aina Nowack, Madrid
2017 Black & White, Outsider Art Galerie, Amsterdam
2016 Perceptions: The Art of Citizenship, Cork, Ireland
2016 Brake a Leg, European Capital of Culture, San Sebastián
2011 Exhibition #4, The Museum of Everything, London
