Gaston Orellana
1933– · Chilean painter of the New Figuration and informal abstraction
Gastón Orellana (Valparaíso, 1933) is a Chilean painter whose career unfolded between Madrid, New York and Italy. The son of an Andalusian mother and an Extremaduran father from an old aristocratic family of Trujillo, he reached artistic maturity between 1959 and the mid-1960s, when in Madrid he helped promote the so-called nueva figuración with the Hondo group.
During those years he combined informal abstraction with a existential figuration of mystical tone, producing rebellious and almost extravagant images. In New York he found success through the gallerist Martha Jackson, thanks to paintings of balanced beauty and a European sensibility. In the mid-1970s he broke with that balance and turned to the collage of styles circulating in the United States.
In the 1980s, with the series titled "Bronx", his work acquired a conceptual foundation. In the 1990s his interests crystallised in graphite over oil, drawing on Andean archaeological ceramics after a journey through Peru, Bolivia and Argentina in 1958. Recent exhibitions in Milan, Taipei and Cáceres show an artist far removed from his neofigurative beginnings.
His best-known work, "El tren en llamas" (New York, 1960), is held by the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington. He took part in the Spanish pavilion at the 1970 Venice Biennale, and his work is held in numerous public collections. The Archivo Gastón Orellana, founded in 2018, is responsible for conserving and cataloguing his work.