About
Ima Montoya is a Basque painter, born in Bilbao in 1963. She studied fine art at the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU) and lives in Barcelona, where she works in her studio in El Raval.
She returned to painting in London in 1995. In 1998 she moved to Tokyo, where she studied Japanese, calligraphy and sumi-e ink painting under Ota Sensei, and began exhibiting, including at the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum.
She went on to live in Moscow from 2006, Budapest from 2009 and Mexico City from 2014. In Moscow she showed at MMOMA and Winzavod and began a long collaboration with the Instituto Cervantes. From Budapest she represented Spain during the Spanish presidency of the European Union, with an exhibition at the Berlaymont building of the European Commission in Brussels. In Mexico City she met Raffaella De Chirico, who has been her gallerist since.
She works in series, mainly in oil on canvas and in large formats, and has exhibited with the Instituto Cervantes in Europe, North Africa and Brazil, at the Newport Art Museum in the United States, and at art fairs including Art Verona and Arte in Nuvola.
In her words
Movement and structure are central to my practice. I am interested in things that are alive, organic and continuously changing: structures that do not remain still, but grow, shift and transform. I rarely paint specific things. Rather, I use painting to follow a movement, a rhythm or an emerging form, allowing the image to develop through the process of making it.
I do not always know where I am going or exactly what I am looking for. What I know is that I recognise something when I encounter it.
Writing on the work
“In Ima Montoya’s painting, the image does not precede the gesture; it takes shape through it.”
“Perhaps this is precisely the distinctive quality of her more recent work: to be simultaneously inside and outside of our time.”
Facts
- Born Bilbao, 1963
- Degree in Fine Art, Universidad del País Vasco (UPV/EHU)
- Studio in El Raval, Barcelona
- Represented by Raffaella De Chirico Gallery, Milan
- Collections include Stephen F. Austin State University, Texas, and the Imago Mundi Collection