JUAN COSSIO

JUAN MANUEL COSSIO was born in Madrid in 1960. He studied Art and History at the city’s University Complutense and between 1980 and 1985 he worked as a Copyist at the Museo del Prado. From 1986 Cossio was a student of Manuel Franquelo, one of Spain’s leading hyper-realist painters. Juan Cossio currently lives and works in Madrid. 
Cossio uses an airbrush to create these beautifully detailed paintings. He dresses his characters in white robes and places them in functional, minimalistic interiors. This leaves the context of his paintings devoid of time or place. The women’s facial expressions and the placement of their bodies become the most important subject in each piece, rather than the clothes they wear or the spaces they inhabit. The artist often seems to have taken as a starting point a classical composition from one of the Old Masters and transported the arrangement into another dimension, and leaves us with an expertly depicted arrangement of figures in empty space.