Sebastian Diaz Morales

Last updated
Sebastian Diaz Morales
Born1975
Education Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten

Sebastian Diaz Morales (born 1975) is an Argentine visual artist.

Born in 1975 in Comodoro Rivadavia, Argentina, and currently dividing his time between that city and Amsterdam, the Netherlands, Sebastián Díaz Morales belongs to the newest generation of Latin American artists. In his films and videos, Mr. Diaz Morales explores the possibilities of video from a perspective that falls somewhere between documentarism and reinterpretation of a reality seen through playfulness, irony, and a pained scepticism. Essentially cultured and technologically skilled, Mr. Díaz Morales, like the other members of this new generation of artists, knows how to use the filmic language by drawing on the social experiences of his country and immediate surroundings to produce works that entirely escape any parochial reading.

The creation of an unusual atmosphere imbued with a strange sense of unrest is first and foremost.

His works can be described as filmic narratives embracing stories that sometimes resemble science fiction, sometimes with certain catastrophic overtones, and in which there is an ever-present common denominator of a minimalist narrative style wherein the camera is always moving and in which the characters virtually function as metaphors for a story that goes beyond the anecdote to reveal problems of great scope in current society. His work encompasses the most contemporary and creative reportage, epic narrative, documentaries, short auteur films, filmic essays, and indeed an undeniable touch of poetry that cause his videos to oscillate between reality and fiction, always filtered through the artist's creative subjectivism.

They all start from small stories, apparently trivial situations that give rise to other symbolic stories that stir our conscience and renovate our concept of the work of art.

His work has been exhibited widely at many prominent venues—such as the Tate Modern, London; Centre Pompidou; Stedelijk Museum and De Appel, Amsterdam; Art in General, New York City; Ludwin Museum, Budapest; Bienal de São Paulo; Biennale of Sydney; Miro Foundation, Barcelona; MUDAM, Luxemburg; and the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon—and is the permanent collections of the Centre Pompidou; Tate Modern; Fundacion Jumex, Mexico; Sandretto Foundation, Torino; Sammlung-Goetz, Munich; and the Fundacion de Arte Moderna, Museo Berardo, Lisbon. In 2009 he was awarded with a Guggenheim Fellowship.

(Adapted from an article by Rosa Olivares)

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Paula Rego</span> Portuguese visual artist (1935–2022)

Dame Maria Paula Figueiroa Rego was a Portuguese-British visual artist known particularly for her paintings and prints based on storybooks. Rego's style evolved from abstract towards representational, and she favoured pastels over oils for much of her career. Her work often reflects feminism, coloured by folk-themes from her native Portugal.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gary Hill</span> American artist

Gary Hill is an American artist who lives and works in Seattle, Washington. Often viewed as one of the foundational artists in video art, based on the single-channel work and video- and sound-based installations of the 1970s and 1980s, he in fact began working in metal sculpture in the late 1960s. Today he is best known for internationally exhibited installations and performance art, concerned as much with innovative language as with technology, and for continuing work in a broad range of media. His longtime work with intermedia explores an array of issues ranging from the physicality of language, synesthesia and perceptual conundrums to ontological space and viewer interactivity. The recipient of many awards, his influential work has been exhibited in most major contemporary art museums worldwide.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Andreas Gursky</span> German artist and photographer

Andreas Gursky is a German photographer and professor at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, Germany.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ken Feingold</span> Artist

Kenneth Feingold is a contemporary American artist based in New York City. He has been exhibiting his work in video, drawing, film, sculpture, photography, and installations since 1974. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship (2004) and a Rockefeller Foundation Media Arts Fellowship (2003) and has taught at Princeton University and Cooper Union for the Advancement of Art and Science, among others. His works have been shown at the Museum of Modern Art, NY; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Tate Liverpool, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among others.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alex McDowell</span> British production designer

Alex McDowell is a British narrative designer and creative director working in narrative media. He is a strong advocate of world building and immersive design and integrates digital technology and traditional design technique in his work. He has created a holistic design process that incorporates ideation, inception, prototyping, and production for tangible story worlds.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jean-Marc Bustamante</span> French artist, painter, sculptor and photographer

Jean-Marc Bustamante is a French artist, painter, sculptor and photographer. He is a noted conceptual and installation artist and has incorporated ornamental design and architectural space in his works.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries</span>

Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries (장영혜중공업) is a Seoul-based Web art group consisting of Young-Hae Chang and Marc Voge. The group formed in 1999. Young-hae Chang is a Korean artist and translator with a Ph.D. in aesthetics from the Universite de Paris I, while Marc Voge is an American poet who lives in Seoul.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jacques Monory</span> French painter (1924–2018)

Jacques Monory was a French painter and filmmaker whose work, highly influenced by photography and cinema, is an allegory of the contemporary world with a focus on the violence of everyday reality. His canvases evoke a heavy atmosphere, pulling subject matter from modern civilization through the lens of his signature monochrome color blue.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Michael Smith (performance artist)</span> American artist (born 1951)

Michael Smith is an American artist known for his performance, video and installation works. He emerged in the mid-1970s at a time when performance and narrative-based art was beginning to claim space in contemporary art. Included among the Pictures Generation artists, he also appropriated pop culture, using television conventions rather than tropes from static media. Since 1979, much of Smith's work has centered on an Everyman character, "Mike," that he has portrayed in various domestic, entrepreneurial and artistic endeavors. Writers have described his videos and immersive installations as "poker-faced parodies" that sit on the edge between art and entertainment, examining ideas, cultural shifts and absurdities involving the American dream, consumerism, the art world, and aging. Village Voice critic Jerry Saltz called Smith "a consummate explorer of the land of the loser … limning a fine line between reality and satire [in] a genre sometimes called installation verité."

Mark Leckey is a British contemporary artist. His found object art and video pieces, which incorporate themes of nostalgia and anxiety, and draw on elements of pop culture, span several works and exhibitions. In particular, he is known for Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore (1999) and Industrial Light and Magic (2008), for which he won the 2008 Turner Prize.

Speculative fiction is defined as science fiction, fantasy, and horror. Within those categories exists many other subcategories, for example cyberpunk, magical realism, and psychological horror.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Fiction</span> Narrative with imaginary elements

Fiction is any creative work, chiefly any narrative work, portraying individuals, events, or places that are imaginary, or in ways that are imaginary. Fictional portrayals are thus inconsistent with history, fact, or plausibility. In a traditional narrow sense, "fiction" refers to written narratives in prose – often referring specifically to novels, novellas, and short stories. More broadly, however, fiction encompasses imaginary narratives expressed in any medium, including not just writings but also live theatrical performances, films, television programs, radio dramas, comics, role-playing games, and video games.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster</span> French artist

Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster is a French visual artist and educator. She is known for her work in video projection, photography, and art installations. She has worked in landscaping, design, and writing. "I always look for experimental processes. I like the fact that at the beginning I don't know how to do things and then, slowly, I start learning. Often exhibitions don't give me this learning possibility anymore."

Rosa Barba is a German-Italian visual artist and filmmaker. Barba is known for using the medium of film and its materiality to create cinematic film installations, sculptures and publications, which inquire into the ambiguous nature of reality, memory, landscape and their role in their mutual constitution and representation. Barba currently lives and works in Berlin, Germany.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Aaron Koblin</span> American digital media artist

Aaron Koblin is an American digital media artist and entrepreneur best known for his innovative use of data visualization and his pioneering work in crowdsourcing, virtual reality, and interactive film. He is co-founder and president of virtual reality company Within, founded with Chris Milk. Formerly he created and lead the Data Arts Team at Google in San Francisco, California from 2008 to 2015.

Carlos Casas is a filmmaker and artist whose practice encompasses film, sound and the visual arts. His films have been screened and awarded in festivals around the world, like the Venice Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Buenos Aires International Film Festival, Mexico International Film Festival, CPH DOX Copenhagen, FID Marseille, etc... Retrospectives of his films have been presented international festivals and cinematheques from Madrid, Mexico to Bruxelles, his work has been exhibited and performed in international art institutions and galleries, such as Tate Modern in London, Fondation Cartier, Palais de Tokyo, Centre Pompidou in Paris, NTU CCA Singapore; Hangar Bicocca, and La Triennale in Milan, CCCB Barcelona, Matadero Madrid, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía Madrid, MAAT Lisbon, GAM Torino, Bozar, Kunsten Festival des Arts Bruxelles … among others. He has collaborated with musicians and artists like Phill Niblock, Z'EV, Nico Vascellari, Prurient, Sebastian Escofet, Nastro Mortal.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Helena Almeida</span> Portuguese photographer (1934–2018)

Helena AlmeidaGOIH was a Portuguese artist known for her work in photography, performance art, body art, painting and drawing.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Fernanda Gomes</span> Brazilian visual artist

Fernanda Gomes is a Brazilian visual artist. She emerged as part of the generation of Rio de Janeiro-born artists that also include Beatriz Milhazes, Ernesto Neto and Adriana Varejão. With a career that began in the 1980s, her first solo exhibition took place in London in 1997.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dora García</span> Spanish artist

Dora García is a contemporary Spanish artist. García draws on interactivity and performance in her work, using the exhibition space as a platform to investigate the relationship between artwork, audience, and place. García transforms spaces into a sensory experiences by altering perception and creating situations of interaction, often using intermediaries to enhance critical thinking. By engaging with the binary of reality vs. fiction, visitors become implicated as protagonists either in the construction of a collective fiction or questioning of empirical constructions–sometimes knowingly, and sometimes not. Since 1999 García has created several artworks on the web.

João Onofre is a Portuguese visual artist. He had his first solo exhibition in 2001, at I-20 Gallery in New York. Since then, he has made over 35 solo shows and taken part in over 200 group exhibitions in both Portuguese and in International museums and galleries. He lives and works in Lisbon.