From Berlin (Mariano Carrera)

Dis Berlin (Mariano Carrera) - The street

Biografía del Artista: From Berlin Soria, 1959 Born in Soria in 1959 under the name of Mariano Carrera, Dis Berlin took his stage name from a Roxy Music song upon his arrival in Madrid in 1982. Music –with authors such as David Bowie-, literature, advertising and classic cinema are the references that placed his work at the forefront of the Madrid art scene in the 1980s. His first exhibition in 1982 revealed an author with a profound figurative vision who constructed scenes of great narrative and iconographic force. His paintings in the form of isolated or successive cinematographic frames, an effect achieved by dividing the canvas into different scenes, gave him a place of his own on the Spanish art scene. From those years, his pictorial collaborations with Pedro Almodóvar's cinematography are well known (La Ley del Deseo, Átame, Tacones Lejanos and Kika). As he entered the 90s, his style became more specific and much more personal. The technical keys were saturated colours and contrasts between cold and warm tones, as well as his combination of points of view in flat paintings in which the sense of depth was deliberately eliminated. In his works, motifs are woven together in a metaphysical interpretation of his particular personal universe reflected in multiple references that produce fantastic scenes with a marked dreamlike-surrealist air. His imaginary kaleidoscope in the style of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland combines literary references (Ovid, Borges, The Thousand and One Nights), pictorial (Patinir, Corot, Magritte), cinematographic (Fellini, Walt Disney, the Coen brothers) and musical (Sargent Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band by the Beatles or Forever Changes by Love). Since then, his career has been marked by themes addressed in his particular style. Issues such as the painter's space, the decontextualization of everyday objects, or the circuits that add, unite and relate multiple personal references as a complete personal map. His work for the MAXAM Collection and image for the 2014 calendar of explosives is a Chemical Circuit in which he captures the different activities, as well as specific products and references to the more than 140 years of history of the patron company. All of these aspects were discovered on two trips he made to the House of Explosives at the Museum of Mining and Industry of Asturias (MUMI, www.mumi.es). Dis Berlin's work can be found in museums such as the Atlantic Centre of Modern Art (Las Palmas de Gran Canaria), IVAM (Valencia), Artium (Vitoria) or Marugame Hirai (Kagawa, Japan). In addition to being a painter, Mariano Carrera/Dis Berlin also works as a photographer and sculptor. He has a broad relationship with art, having also been a gallery owner, editor and exhibition curator, a job that he still combines with that of a creator.