José Manuel Ballester

Painter and photographer, degree in Fina Arts in 1984 from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spanish Photography Award 2010. He began his artistic career with paintings focusing on the techniques of the Italian and Flemish Schools.

His painting started as being realist but it soon branched off towards a more personal language tending towards abstraction. In 1990 he began to combine painting and photography, since de nineties he has been composing images of contemporary architecture in which the human figure is almost always excluded. He has also began a new work, he reinvents classic paintings by removing the characters: in his Hidden Spaces image series he removes the people from classical paintings revealing unnoticed hidden spaces and objects.

Combining modern technologies with classical art, he invites viewers to look at masterpieces ( The Birth of Venus by Botticelli, Las Meninas by Velázquez, The Third of May by Goya, The Last Supper by Da Vinci, etc.) from a new angle and reinterpret the stories we think we already know. The removal of people creates a different effect in each painting.