Miguel Wattio

Miguel Watio - Ten minutes from the sea

Técnica: Acrylic

Biografía del Artista: Miguel Watio (Seville, 1966) is a self-taught artist who has lived in Gijón since 2004. From a very young age he showed artistic interests. Although he held several exhibitions in cultural centres in Seville, he always worked there as an electrician (hence the name Watio) and it was not until 2011 when he held his first solo exhibition in an art gallery. It was in Gijón, at the Galería Cornión, with which he continued working until its closure in 2022. In that first exhibition he surprised with a mix of surrealism and pop where a series of characters walking under the window of his house coexisted with everyday objects. This series was called precisely “From my window”. In 2014 he held his next exhibition: “Popular Classics” where, continuing with his characteristic pop style, he made a humorous review of the history of art. From this date onwards he began to make geometric compositions where pop characters coexist within a geometric “landscape”. From 2015 onwards, after the death of his sister, his characters are transformed into black silhouettes of walkers who wander through an abstract-geometric world. This new stage lasts until 2020 and the two exhibitions he holds at the Cornión gallery in Gijón in 2017 and 2022 have very significant titles: “De Paso” (2017) and “Camín a Niundes” (2020). Currently Miguel Watio has begun a new stage where his characters seem to have come back to life with their original pop within their landscapes of geometric abstraction.

Miguel Watio is a Sevillian painter who has lived in Gijón (Asturias) since 2004. He has an extensive exhibition career in northern Spain and, with a style close to Pop Art, he uses irony to give his works a touch of social criticism. "In my painting I mix abstract geometry with figuration, by adding a silhouette of a walker to the work." Watt