García de Marina is a contemporary artist born in Gijón, Spain in 1975, whose work transforms everyday objects into powerful carriers of emotion and symbolic meaning. Since 2011, he has developed a distinctive visual language that explores the hidden poetry of the prosaic, creating intimate narratives through minimal compositions that bridge surrealism and the territories of dreams.
His artistic practice emerged from a profound personal transformation in 2010, when a dormant passion for photography broke through into conscious expression. Within months, his unusual photographic gaze captured attention through social media, quickly transitioning from digital platforms to gallery walls and establishing him as a significant voice in contemporary visual poetry.
García de Marina's Artistic Philosophy
García de Marina's work is deliberately irreverent with reality. He transforms objects, assigns them new identities, and rebels against the obvious to reveal the grandeur of the everyday. A piece of cutlery, a matchstick, or an eggshell becomes a vessel for emotion or a fragment of an intimate story. The starkness of his photographs—free from digital manipulation and stripped of artifice—grants full protagonism to objects removed from their original function and reinvented within minimal staged settings.
The artist never titles his works, favoring open interpretation that allows each image to find its meaning in the viewer's gaze. His process is grounded in physical transformation and the construction of scenes that, through precise perspective, reveal unexpected significance. As he works with intuition, condensation, and essentiality, his photographs establish affinities with surrealism while maintaining a distinctly contemporary sensibility rooted in the material world.
International Recognition of García de Marina
García de Marina's work has been presented across five continents in museums, cultural institutions, galleries, and photography festivals. In 2015, he was selected by the Embassy of Spain to participate in Photo Week Washington D.C. Two years later, the prestigious Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León (MUSAC) included three of his pieces in "Constelaciones – Poesía experimental en España (1963–2016)," the first comprehensive survey dedicated to Spanish visual and experimental poetry since the 1960s.
In 2018, he presented "Diálo2" at the Museo Barjola alongside works by Joan Brossa, one of the most important figures in 20th-century Spanish visual poetry. His project "The Unfinished Word," which investigates the relationship between visual and written language, was shown at the Instituto Cervantes in Belgrade (2019) and subsequently at Laboral Ciudad de la Cultura and various Instituto Cervantes centers internationally.
The year 2021 marked a historic milestone when the Spanish postal service issued 162,000 stamps featuring one of his works—the first official stamp in the world dedicated to mail art. That same year, the Erarta Museum in Saint Petersburg, Russia's largest private contemporary art museum, presented a retrospective of his work.
In 2024, García de Marina achieved another significant honor when the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Havana dedicated a retrospective to his work—the first ever granted to a Spanish photographer in the institution's history. That same year, the Erarta Museum inaugurated a second exhibition of his work, attended by more than 110,000 visitors, making him the first artist to hold two major shows at this prestigious institution.
His participation in international festivals includes Photo Romania Festival, Photometria Festival in Greece, Festival de la Luz in Argentina, Bucharest Foto Week, Addis Foto Fest in Ethiopia, Uppsala Foto Festival in Sweden, Yangon Photo Festival in Myanmar, Belgrade Photo Month, Budapest Photo Fest, and Xposure International Photography Festival in the United Arab Emirates, among many others. His work continues to resonate with collectors and institutions worldwide, with pieces held in collections spanning multiple continents.