Miguel Ángel Gaüeca

MIGUEL ÁNGEL GAÜECA (Bilbao, 1967)
“Me, Myself, and I,” 2002.
Cibachrome photograph, x10. Prints 3/15.
Signed, dated, and numbered (x10).
Measurements: 25 x 25 cm (photographs, x10); 36.5 x 36.5 cm (mat boards, x10); 38.5 x 35.5 x 5 cm (box).
Some artists use photography to document the world, while others turn it into a stage on which to invent it. Miguel Ángel Gaüeca decidedly belongs to the latter category. For more than three decades, he has forged one of the most personal trajectories in contemporary Spanish art, developing a visual universe where autobiography, fiction, and representation intertwine to the point where it becomes impossible to distinguish where lived experience ends and staging begins. *Me Myself and I* is fully imbued with this poetics. Conceived as a box containing ten Cibachrome photographs, the work offers a reflection on identity understood not as a fixed reality, but as a succession of characters, masks, and narratives that the individual constructs and projects.Far from presenting a conventional self-portrait, Gaüeca transforms the self-image into a territory for experimentation. Each photograph constitutes a variation on the same subject and, at the same time, an indispensable piece of a fragmented narrative that only acquires its full meaning when the collection remains intact.
Miguel Ángel Gaüeca is one of the most distinctive figures in Spanish photography and conceptual art of recent decades. He studied at the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU), where he began to develop an artistic practice linked to contemporary photography and conceptual art. His work has been the focus of numerous solo exhibitions at institutions such as Artium Museoa (Vitoria-Gasteiz), Azkuna Zentroa (Bilbao), the Patio Herreriano Museum (Valladolid), the Andalusian Center for Contemporary Art (Seville), Sala Rekalde (Bilbao), and the Bilbao Museum of Fine Arts, in addition to participating in major group exhibitions both in Spain and abroad. He has been a regular participant at ARCO Madrid, as well as at other international contemporary art fairs. His work is included in major public and private collections, notably the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (Madrid), Artium Museoa (Vitoria-Gasteiz), the Bilbao Museum of Fine Arts, the “la Caixa” Foundation, the DKV Collection, the Banco Sabadell Collection, the Government of Cantabria’s Norte Collection of Contemporary Art, the Basque Government Collection, as well as numerous private collections specializing in contemporary art.