Alejandro Corujeira

In 1991, Corujeira moved to Madrid after a short stay in Mexico. He arrived in a city and a country on the verge of a major re-evaluation of its historic relationship with Latin America, spurred by the 500 anniversary of the Conquest of the Americas. As of 1992, a series of exhibitions in Spain and across the world started to question the dominant narratives of colonization and geopolitics. Corujeira took part in several of these exhibitions, including the seminal La Escuela del Sur: El Taller Torres-García y su Legado curated by Mari Carmen Ramírez and Cecilia de Torres at the Museo Reina Sofía, which later traveled to other museums, like the Archer M. Huntington Gallery (now the Blanton Museum of Art) in Austin, the Bronx Museum in New York, and the Museo Rufino Tamayo in Mexico.

Corujeira's work in this period dialogues with other artists who try to fuse an interest in contemporary abstraction and pre-Columbian art, including Francisco Matto, Josef and Anni Albers, César Paternosto, Alejandro Puente, Alfredo Hlito, and others. His work is imbued with a strong sense of poetry and symbolism, and his titles reflect this interest.

In 2018, Corujeira was invited to make a solo presentation at the 33rd Bienal da São Paulo by curator Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro. He created a large-scale sculptural/pictorial environment on the mezzanine of the iconic Oscar Niemeyer pavilion. This included a maze-like structure of curved painted wooden panels through which visitors could walk, as well as two free standing sculptures, a series of paintings, and a painted intervention on the wall.

Since then, his work has continued to develop into new poetic languages in painting and sculpture, always within the tradition of abstraction. He held two solo exhibitions in London (2018 and 2020) at Cecilia Brunson Projects.

Alejandro’s drawings are closely related to his paintings and sculptures, tied together in themes and ideas as he works through processes of forms, arrangement and color. The curvatures that originate in his drawings appear in the sculptures and canvas, as a kind of working composition.

Drawing is a vital practice within Alejandro’s artistic process—its repetitive, intuitive and immediate nature helps to conjure images and ideas deep within his mind. For this reason Alejandro has likened drawing in his practice to breathing, walking, and meditating. The drawings are thoughts emerging, always present and accompanying him throughout his creative process in painting and sculpture. The drawings are the closest and most immediate extension to an image or idea that he’s trying to exteriorize.

As he states, “for me, drawing has its own autonomy, and in many cases it expresses or reveals what painting or sculpture cannot, just like when we search for the right word to finish a sentence.”