Artists
Although he has explored photography and video, Simeón Saiz Ruiz's (1956, Cuenca, Spain) work has been mainly focused on painting as a media. This artist is representative of the revival of 'history painting', an approach in which figurative painting becomes a key media to address contemporary social issues. Saiz Ruiz not only uses it to portray history, but also to question how images are built and manipulated in visual culture. With a style characterised by plain colours, thick strokes and manipulated photographs, he seeks to reflect on the role that painting has in the collective memory and its relation to historical events, distancing himself from formalist debates in order to focus on the ideological impact of visual representations.
