Manuel Vilariño
Manuel Vilariño (A Coruña, 1952), is a photographer and poet. He is one of the most outstanding artists of the contemporary art scene. From the moment he held his first exhibition in 1982, his work has been kept on display around multiple remarkable galleries and museums becoming part of their collections, such as the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, at the Fine Arts Museum in Boston, at the Museo Extremeño e Iberoamericano de Arte Contemporáneo (MEIAC) in Badajoz, ARTIUM in Vitoria or the Coca-Cola Art Collection.
In 2007 he was awarded the National Photography Award by the Ministry of Culture of Spain. During the same year he took part in the exhibition Paraíso fragmentado, curated by Alberto Ruiz de Samaniego, at the Spanish Pavilion in the Venice Biennial.
Among his most outstanding exhibitions, we can recall as remarkable the one held in 2002 at the Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea of Santiago de Compostela Manuel Vilariño. Fío e sombra, or Mar de afuera held at the Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid in 2012. He has exhibited internationally at Galerie Municipale du Château d’Eau. Toulouse (solo show, 2001), and participaed in other exhibitions in several European countries. In 2008 the Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation (AECID) organized an itinerary exhibition with his works, curated by Fernando Castro Flórez, and it was displayed at the Centro Cultural de España in Asunción (Paraguay), the Museo Balmes in Motevideo (Uruguay), the Museo de Arte Moderno in Sao Paulo (Brazil) and at the MAC Niteroi in Rio de Janeiro (Brazil).
He participated in the 2012 edition of the project Peregrinatio in Sagunto, organized by the Consorcio de Museos of the Comunidad Valenciana and in 2013 he carried out the project Fragmentos de un viaje, as a result of a poetic tour around Extremadura held at the MEIAC, Museo Extremeño e Iberoamericano of Badajoz.
Many outstanding poets have been atracted to write about the artworks of Manuel Vilariño, such as Antonio Gamoneda, Chantal Maillard or Juan Barja, writters like Manuel Rivas, philosophers like Félix Duque and critics like Miguel Fernández-Cid, Miguel Copón or Alberto Ruiz de Samaniego.
His photography is interrelated to a sense of poetry —Ruinas al despertar (Espiral Maior Edicións, 2011); or Animal insomne (Trifolium, 2017)— according to what he asserted “my photography would not exist without poetry; together become a whole […]”.
