Biscayan painter, born in Bilbao in 1956. Son of the photographer Iñaki Bilbao Bilbao.
In 1978 he qualified as a drawing teacher at the Bilbao School of Fine Arts and won the post of Acting Teacher at the Barakaldo III Secondary School by public competition. In 1981 he obtained the post of Assistant Lecturer of Baccalaureate and the validation of the title of Professor of Drawing with that of Graduate in Fine Arts. He received a grant for artistic creation awarded by the Ministry of Culture in 1983. Some time later, in 1992, he began to teach Basque at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the UPV. After obtaining the title of Doctor of Fine Arts in 1994, two years later he was appointed Professor in the Department of Painting at the University of the Basque Country.
In 1977 he took part in a group exhibition at the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum, as a result of his selection in the 3rd Basque-Navarre Painting Competition. A year later he was awarded prizes in the IV Euskal Artea Painting Biennial and in the Bizkaiko Artea competition in 1985. His first individual exhibition took place in 1976 in Barakaldo. Two years later he had an exhibition at the Recalde Gallery in Bilbao. He took part in the Arteder fair in Bilbao, where he had individual exhibitions in 1981 and 1983. In 1986 he exhibited at the Aula de Cultura in Murcia and a year later at the Museo de La Rioja, Logroño. He followed this with exhibitions at the CLP Gallery in Portugalete (1988), at the Caja Laboral Gallery in Vitoria (1989), at the Estación del Norte in Bilbao, sponsored by Renfe (1990), at Udal Aretoa in Gernika (1991), at the Velázquez Gallery in Valladolid and Arrigorriaga (1992), and at the La Brocha Gallery in Bilbao (1992), at the La Brocha Gallery in Bilbao (1996), at the Alcázar de los Condestables in Medina de Pomar and at the Ibercaja Gallery in Logroño (2000), at the Kutxa Gallery in San Sebastián (2001), at the Municipal Gallery in Barakaldo (2002), or at Bikuña Jauregia in Legazpi (2003) where he s Pasaia.
Among the collective exhibitions in which he has taken part, we can highlight the travelling exhibition Bizkaiko Pintura Gaur (1979), Arte Bizkaia in the Sala Rekalde in Bilbao (1987), the travelling exhibition Margen Izquierda (1998), or the one held together with Jorge Baldessari in the Cervantes Institute in Utrech (2001). Regarding his work, Paco Juan Costa writes in the catalogue of the Ezkerraldea Plastika exhibition:
‘...it evidently comes from a clearly pictorial vocation, linked to the most contemporary realisms and, we think, of expressionist commitment, with references to pop in its use of popular elements insofar as they are recognisable...’.
In the catalogue produced for his exhibition Pasaia , in Legazpi, the painter talks about his own work in this way:
‘Painting, that which makes us recognise and remember, is an art of the past, like Greek tragedy or like the dances of the aborigines, I believe that this is an explanation that should be given to the spectator so that he does not feel the anxiety of whether he understands it or not, whether he is up to date or not. With these paintings that I submit for your consideration, which are figurative, the intention is to appeal to that capacity to provoke the memory of what has already been seen and to that small emotion that recognising what we are seeing gives us, especially in a place like Pasaia, which is changing so rapidly. Just like art. We should not think that we are contemplating something related to the art of the moment, no. It is a medium of the past, a medium of the past. It is a medium of the past, used to make the spectator remember and recognise something that is changing and will soon be past, at least in the form in which it appears in these paintings’.
Ceferino de Olmo, head of the Sala de Cultura of Barakaldo Town Hall, with whom the painter has maintained a close relationship since his beginnings, speaks thus of the paintings exhibited in 1996 at La Brocha Gallery:
‘...unusual character: poetry, metaphor, dream, coexistence of unusual realities and, above all, presence: although the painter wanted to put the figure and the background on the same footing, in the end, the character wins the battle. It is he who makes the painting come alive, who illuminates the presence of the space he occupies with the light of his humanity’.
Translated with DeepL.com (free version)