Alejandro Pintado | Art Residency at Hotel El Ganzo

MEET ALEJANDRO PINTADO

Born in Mexico City in 1973, Alejandro Pintado studied painting at the Escuela Nacional de Pintura, Escultura y Grabado La Esmeralda, and earned a Master of Fine Arts degree from Goldsmiths College, University of London. He has been awarded a grant from the National System of Art Creators (FONCA, 2010-2013), a grant from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation and the Skowhegan program (both in 2007), the Centennial Painting Award at Zona MACO (2012), the special prize at Arte Laguna (Venice, 2010), and first place at the Miradas de Tijuana Biennial (2013). Among the venues where he has had solo exhibitions are the Museo Nacional de San Carlos, the Museo Nacional de Arte (MUNAL), and the Galería Arróniz in Mexico City, as well as at the Hamiltonian Gallery in Washington, D.C., the Post Box Gallery in London, and the ICM in Berlin. His work fuses charcoal reliefs on linen canvases with contemporary interventions in fluorescent acrylic, spray paint, and neon, exploring temporal tensions between past, present, and future through color as a temporal symbol.

ART RESIDENCY

2021

Alejandro Pintado transformed the hotel’s façade with metal beams painted in bold colors that appear to pierce through the walls and extend up to the ceiling. The work creates a dialogue between architecture and sculpture, evoking references to both geometric minimalism and the site-specific art interventions of the 1960s and 1970s. These beams, which disrupt the building’s structural logic, challenge the boundary between the structural and the symbolic: they do not support, but rather visually tension the space. The piece is part of a tradition in which color and geometry alter the viewer’s perception, recalling the experiments of Russian Constructivism and artists such as Donald Judd or Richard Serra, but with a pictorial gesture that reveals Pintado’s interest in rethinking painting beyond the canvas.