Juan Miguel Palacios

Art is the catalyst of my emotions and thoughts, acting as a bridge between my inner and outer world.

––Juan Miguel Palacios, Painter

Madrid-born, Brooklyn-based artist Juan Miguel Palacios paints figures which appear to crumble, drip, and dissolve. Using unusual surfaces like collapsing sheetrock, his intimate paintings interrogate complex emotions. Palacios’ works tightly focus on the face, rendered in muted colors, dripping and fading. He merges socio-political realities and his own personal experience to create something modern and recognizable.

Palacios began painting at the early age of six. His wild paintings would travel from his paper to the table to the wall. Noticing this creative fury, Palacios’ mother fooled him into going to a painting class (he wanted karate) and he never turned back. At age twelve, he joined the studio of celebrated Spanish painter Amadeo Roca Gisbert, a disciple of Joaquin Sorolla. After years of strict training, Palacios attended the Faculty of Fine Arts in Madrid. He went on to found his own art school, Laocoonte. Palacios began painting murals, theatre scenery, and film posters, all the while developing his own personal art-making and continuing to teach. Looking at his early work, there is a clear continued interest in ambiguous, tormented imagery. Palacios peels back façades and exposes the rawness and hidden traumas of the human experience. He is driven by the search for new avenues to express the deep honesty that characterizes his work.