Xosé Artiaga

In 2017 he was one of the three invited artists selected for the VII New Artists Meeting "Cidade da Cultura" to give a master class, together with María Cañas and Berta Álvarez Cáccamo.

To raise funds for this foundation, in 2017 he organized an itinerant collective exhibition entitled "AAN in ART", which brought together works by 42 Galician plastic artists, passing through the Torrente Ballester Foundation (Santiago de Compostela) in March and in July through the Pazo de Sabadelle (Chantada).

On July 8, 2015, he created the Artiaga Foundation in Vilagarcía de Arousa, classified as of cultural interest by the Xunta de Galicia in the same year. This foundation aims to spread culture through art, contribute to the cultural, social and scientific development of Galicia, promote the study and conservation of Xosé Artiaga's work, as well as the search for new artists, and protect abandoned animals. The board of trustees is chaired by the artist and completed in the positions of vice president and secretary by his two sons, José and Saudade Artiaga Rodero.

In February 1996, the first issue of the magazine Arte y Parte, subtitled "bimonthly magazine of artistic information", was published, a benchmark in the international field of Latin visual arts, directed by the Galician art critic Miguel Fernández-Cid, who has repeatedly analyzed Artiaga's work since meeting him in 1984. In that first number, Fernández-Cid acknowledged the attention and collaboration given to, among others, Xosé Artiaga in the development of this journalistic project. In 1998, four of his works, belonging to the Reencontres series, were chosen to illustrate in said magazine one of the stories in the Palabras para el arte section (trans. Words for art).

In 1994 he was awarded with the VII Premio Constitución de Pintura (trans. Constitution of Painting Award) of the Government of Extremadura, and in the same way he has obtained the L'Oreal Painting Award in several occasions.

Mainly from the middle of the 1990s, Artiaga experiments more and more regularly with other supports. So, for example, with photography. The critic David Barro points out in this sense that «he changes the support, but not the flag, he doesn't work as an opportunist, but relies on photography with the purpose of achieving results that painting does not achieve, never to betray it».

Apart from his artistic career, he has worked as an art teacher in different educational centers. In 1984 he applied to join the Corps of High School Professors, being appointed at the beginning of 1986. He worked as a drawing teacher at IES Galileo Galilei (in Alcorcón, from the 1987–88 academic year), at IES Iturralde (in Madrid) and at Vilagarcía de Arousa.

He regularly has participated in numerous art contests, several times presented by the Emilio Navarro Gallery from Madrid. At the age of twenty-six, he presented the work Personaje de madrugada (trans. Character in the early morning) at the IX National Art Contest convened by the Caja de Ahorros de Guadalajara, being chosen among the thirty-three finalists, whose works were exhibited from October the 30th of 1981. His first individual exhibition took place in April 1985 at the exhibition hall of the Provincial Deputation of Lugo, and his first exhibition in Madrid was at Columela Gallery in 1988. He has also exhibited his work at Art Basel, ARCO, Salón de los 16, Mostra Gas Natural Fenosa, EXPO Chicago and Premio de Pintura L'Oreal, among others. He has also collaborated with different journalistic media, such as Diario 16 (Madrid), El Progreso (Lugo), Faro de Vigo (Vigo), El Correo Gallego (Santiago) and the magazine Monfadal (Mondoñedo).

His art passed through a figurative intimacy, technically characterized by the materiality of his painting and color, to an increasingly greater abstraction and schematism from the end of the 1980s. His most important series in the 1990s and the beginning of the new century are "Presencias" (Presences, 1990–93), "Reencontres" (Remeetings, 1994; where he began to experiment with photography) and "Utopías" (Utopias, 2000; where he began to use digital elements).

Xosé Artiaga Barreira (Galician: [ʃoˈse aɾtjaɣa bareiɾa]; born July 10, 1955), is a Galician painter, engraver, photographer and multimedia artist, as well as teacher of drawing.

Xosé Artiaga Barreira was born at Mondoñedo, a little town in the North of the province of Lugo, July 10, 1955. He studied at Escuela Superior de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, Madrid. In 1983 he presented the validation thesis for the degree at the Faculty of Fine Arts (Complutense University of Madrid) with the title La cultura castreña (trans. The castro culture), supervised by professor Juan Fernando de Laiglesia.