20th-21st century. Spanish

Jesús Mari Lazkano is one of the main exponents of Realism in the Basque Country. He discovered his vocation for art early in life, and started to take part in painting contests at a very young age. In 1977 he enrolled at the School of Fine Arts in Bilbao, where he graduated in 1982 and then completed a PhD in 1994 with a dissertation titled On the distance between the formal in architecture and architecture as image in the painting of Jesús Mari Lazcano. Or how things change depending on the way we look at them.

In his early stages as an artist, his work showed an evident leaning towards a Pop aesthetics. That said, with the passing of time he would leave behind that language to embrace figurative painting imbued with a surrealist atmosphere, more attuned to the Nordic romantic tradition. In the 1980s, he began to incorporate frames into his painterly landscapes, recalling the theme of the city and rescuing objects, symbols and places from industrial archaeology. A crucial factor in that change was his sojourns in cities like New York, Vienna or Rome, where he settled temporarily in 1998 thanks to a scholarship from the Spanish Academy of Fine Arts, an institution with which he would maintain close ties for the rest of his life. Also worth underscoring is the social orientation of his art, which led him to create large-format pieces for public spaces, notably his interventions for the metro system in Bilbao (1990) and the ceiling in Fundación Argentaria Bilbao (1996).

Since 1975, the year of his first solo exhibition at Sala Pol-Pol in Bilbao, Lazkano has exhibited his work in many shows in Spain and abroad, including retrospectives at Sala BBK (2003) and the Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao (2010). His works have also been on display in events like the Visual Biennial of Vitoria, the Painting and Sculpture Biennial of San Sebastian or the Basque Country Biennial of Amorebieta.

He currently combines art practice and teaching, as a senior lecturer in the Painting Department at the School of Fine Arts of Bilbao. In 2016 he was appointed a member of Jakiunde (Basque Academy of Sciences, Arts and Literature) and has been distinguished with a number of awards, including the Gure Artea Prize (1985) and the Titanio Prize (2007) conferred by the College of Architects of the Basque Country and Navarre.