José Miguel Pereñíguez (Seville, 1977), trained as a painter, has devoted particular attention to drawing, sculpture, and applied arts. Solo exhibitions include Esa sola señal, ACMÉ and La escena y el solar at Galería Rafael Ortiz, Seville (2024, 2016, 2011); El tambor de Sarga and Imagen, sombra, fantasma, rombo at Galería Luis Adelantado, Valencia (2023, 2018); Emblemas y atavíos at Galería Michel Soskine, Madrid (2021); Lo Otro/ Una exposición de artes aplicadas at Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo (2013–14). Distinctions include First Prize in the Cervezas Alhambra Emerging Art Award (2017), Daniel Vázquez Díaz Fellowship (2015), Lissone d’Arte Contemporanea Prize (2010), Velázquez Fellowship, awarded by the Spanish Ministry of Culture (2007), and Generación 2006 Project Grant from the Caja Madrid Foundation.
José Miguel Pereñíguez’s work draws on a broad range of references from the history of art, music, literature, applied arts and performing arts. Rather than approaching these fields as independent subjects, he employs them as frameworks through which to examine the mechanisms of representation and the construction of meaning. His works establish connections between different historical periods and cultural contexts—albeit at times with a distinctly local inflection—exploring the ways in which objects, images, and narratives shape our understanding of the world.
The artist builds a universe composed of objects, vestiges, visual documents, and small-scale structures that evoke archives, relics, effigies, or artifacts of uncertain origin. These assemblages deliberately blur questions of meaning, authenticity, and provenance, encouraging a critical reconsideration of established paradigms of representation. In his drawings, these objects are sometimes associated with the bodies that bears or incorporate them, taking on the appearance of symbolic regalia linked to an unknown ritual, akin to the logic of the emblem or the hieroglyph. Likewise, the machines and other objects he crafts with remarkable precision appear as impossible designs that challenge the relationship between utility, form, and fabrication, while simultaneously questioning the symbolic value and fetishization of the art object.
Pereñíguez’s drawings also reveal his enduring interest in the migration between artistic languages and media, as well as between ideas and disciplines. Whether executed on cardboard or paper, no matter the scale is, they are conceived neither as preparatory studies nor as final autonomous works. Once completed, they become part of an inventory of discrete elements, suspended in a state of indefinite duration, whose ultimate meaning is either clarified or lost within the network of relationships they establish—whether on the walls of the artist’s studio or along the viewer’s path through the exhibition space.
“His works establish connections between different historical periods and cultural contexts—albeit at times with a distinctly local inflection—exploring the ways in which objects, images, and narratives shape our understanding of the world.”
