Hernán Salamanco (Buenos Aires, 1974)
Hernán Salamanco trained as a painter at the Prilidiano Pueyrredón National School of Fine Arts and in the studio of Roberto Duarte in Buenos Aires, and as a lithographer at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of Belgium. In 2000, he received his first recognition from a national institution, the National Arts Fund Scholarship. Over the next decade, he also received the 62nd Rosario National Salon Award (2008), First Prize at the 4th Banco Central Salon, and Second Prize at the Banco de la Nación Salon (2010), among other honors.
Since 2002, he has worked with galleries in Buenos Aires: Braga Menendez, SlyZmud, Tramo, and currently with Herlitzka & Co., and until 2011 also in São Paulo with Thomas Cohn, Baró Cruz, and Oscar Cruz. He held solo exhibitions at each of these venues, as well as at the Arthaus Foundation (2024), the Recoleta Cultural Center (2015), the Borges Cultural Center (2013), and the MACRO Museum in Rosario (2013), all of which were institutional exhibitions.
Regarding his participation in group exhibitions, he presented works alongside his contemporaries at MAMBA, MALBA, Fundación Proa, CCEBA, CCRojas, CCK, Fundación Telefónica, and the Duplus space in his home country. Other exhibitions include London, New York, Santiago de Chile, and Argentina.
As an artist constantly developing for more than two decades, his painting has encompassed different themes and pictorial styles. Perhaps his most characteristic feature is his use of used sheet metal and synthetic enamel. These materials, which frequently depict scenes of an interior or exterior landscape, devoid of human presence, with a strange familiarity and varying degrees of figuration, give him the fundamental qualities of contemporary artwork: singularity, personal style, original rarity, and appealing eccentricity.