Meet the artist

Gabriel Tejada Maggi

Originally from Lima, Peru, Gabriel Tejada Maggi now lives and works in London where he graduated from Byam Shaw School of Art in 2002 and completed his Masters at the Royal College of Art in 2006. His tumultuous landscapes of oil paint are both grotesque and beautiful - <Residues of Hell> in particular is highly evocative of <The Garden of Earthly Delights> by Hieronymus Bosch and further comparisons of his style have been drawn with the likes of Robert Motherwell, Landfield and even Rubens. Yet the subject matter is approached as a blank canvas, a vehicle for <the idea of representation of landscape as metaphor of a state of mind>. Selected as one of the most promising MA graduates of 2006 for the <Zenith> exhibition, Gabriel was subsequently a winner of the Jerwood Contemporary Painters competition in 2007, exhibiting alongside thirty of the most exciting emerging artists in the UK. As he says of his approach, <The attempt was to reconcile the otherworldliness of surrealism and the gesture painterly approach of abstract expressionism. This idea starts more as a desire to compose a kind of ultimate painting than from a conceptual idea of why this should be done, though later I have come to understand it as sublimation of contradicting ideas in myself.>

Work by this artist