García de Marina

The conceptual images of García de Marina are proof that surrealism in photography is thriving well beyond the work of the 20th Century masters who pioneered the genre. Keith Wilson finds out how he creates his unique, witty and thought-provoking photographs…

- Keith Wilson

García de Marina Profile

Born in 1975 in Gijón, where he still lives and works, García de Marina is best known as one of Europe’s most exhibited conceptual and surrealist photographers.

Completely self-taught, he has spent the past decade focusing on developing his unique body of conceptual fine-art photographs.

García’s images have been exhibited in galleries and festivals across Europe and the UK, and further afield to New York, St Petersburg, Australia, Brazil and the UAE.

Last year, the Spanish postal service printed a run of stamps featuring García’s image of a globe protected by a gas mask, his visual comment on the climate crisis.

He is represented by many fine art galleries including Flo Peters Gallery (Germany), Fanxi Delarue Gallery (France), Momentum Fine Art (USA), Gallery 133 (Canada) and M Contemporary (Australia).

On these pages are photos that you were probably not expecting and may find hard to understand. Nor are they straightforward to describe, especially without captions, but they are most certainly surreal. These strange objects and set-ups owe their existence to the highly imaginative mind of García de Marina, a self-taught photographer from Gijón, on Spain’s north coast. In barely 10 years, he has found a large and appreciative audience, with numerous exhibitions of his work across Europe and beyond. The idea behind surrealist photography is never easy to explain, nor is it meant to be, but this inexplicable quality is one of the reasons why it remains popular with photographers and artists since the movement began nearly 100 years ago.