‘As a painter I feel a special predilection for the human figure, because this is where the mystery of many things can be found’ - Ángel Muriel

Ángel Muriel was born in Cáceres, Spain in 1948. He studied at The Municipal School of Fine Arts of Caceres, and the Central School of Applied Arts and Crafts, Madrid. Currently living and working in Madrid, his surrealist Dali-esque work revolves around the duality of love/death. Each piece elegantly reveals the futility of our existence through the artist’s wry sense of humour. Charged with simultaneous attraction and repulsion, these paintings swell out burlesques of constantly mutating figures. The works emphasise the fleeting nature of life with its impossibly shifting boundaries. Piles of voluptuous bodies are deformed with swollen ankles and withered arms, the spawn of a Modigliani and Bottero romance.

Uncomfortable to look at, but nonetheless mesmerising, Muriel’s unusual works are pure theatre. His hallucinogenic visions arise from assigning the psyche a physical form. The artist is a philosopher, questioning the meaning we attach to things through religion or superstition, arguing that everything eventually boils down to erotic ecstasy. These hairless human slow-worms ooze from every pore of the canvas, suffering their extreme Elephantitus. They writhe in an agony that Muriel believes only death will relieve, that simply hitting these strange ganglions with a Bible will not suddenly make them disappear.

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