Gonzalo Borondo — Two Unique Works: Vision and Matter

Gonzalo Borondo (b. 1989) is one of the most distinctive and scenographic voices in contemporary European art. His practice fuses painting, installation and site-specific intervention, producing works that converse with architecture, material memory and the vulnerability of the human body. Working on unconventional supports — glass, wood, recovered metal — Borondo builds a stratified visual language of apparitions, wounds, transparencies and combustion, presented in museums, institutional spaces and international festivals across Italy, France, Germany, Great Britain and Spain.

This lot brings together two unique works that mark decisive moments in that research. La preda (2023), acrylic on glass, 240 × 80 cm, belongs to the Gestazione series, one of the most intense nuclei of his production: the glass, fragile and transparent, becomes a living diaphragm that lets light through while holding the image, and the suspended figure seems to emerge from an intermediate state, a body in transformation that speaks of tension, vulnerability and movement. Untitled II (2015), fire painting on a recycled lead radiator cover, 236 × 75 cm, comes from CHAINED — The Exhibition at Hangar Amari, Wunderkammern Milan: the flame interacts with recovered material, leaving burns and oxidised pigments that become part of the image itself, a memory incised into matter.

Both works were shown in curatorial contexts — Gestazione with PPI & Partners and SPAZIOC21, CHAINED at Wunderkammern — and together they document the two supports that define Borondo's language. Institutional recognition includes exhibitions at the Musei Civici di Pavia, MACRO Rome, the Centre d'Art Contemporain de Montpellier and the Mairie de Paris. What makes the pair consequential for a collection is the combination of two unique large-format works, on non-conventional supports, from the series the market follows most closely.