Felix de La Concha

Félix de la Concha (born 1962) is a painter. Born in León, Spain, he resides in Iowa City and Madrid with his wife, poet Ana Merino.

In 1985 he was selected to participate in the Primera Muestra de Arte Joven (Círculo de Bellas Artes de Madrid) where his work was awarded. Since then he has had several shows, mainly in Europe and the United States, including one person exhibitions in the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh (1999), the Frick Art & Historical Center (2004), Columbus Museum of Art (1998), Museo de Bellas Artes in Santander (1995), Museo del Chopo, México D.F. (1994), Centro Cultural La Recoleta in Buenos Aires (1993), and Centro Rómulo Gallegos in Caracas (1993). His work is included in the collections of the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh, Hood Museum of Art, Columbus Museum of Art, Amigos del Reina Sofía, Colecció Testimoni de la Caixa, Banco de España, Colección Argentaria and Teatro Real de Madrid.

His work One A Day: 365 Views of the Cathedral of Learning, a series that he painted every day during one year while staying in Pittsburgh, is a permanent exhibit at the University of Pittsburgh's Alumni Hall. He has also done other series of paintings in different places such as Rome (the city where he went with a scholarship granted by the Spanish Academy and where he lived from 1989 until 1994), Santander, Seville and Cairo.

He has focused on a particular format of portraiture. It can be seen in video the sitter talking, and the painting evolving from blank canvas to the very conclusion of the work. As painted neither from photographs neither from previous sketches, and usually with a single session (alla prima), eventual errors are keen to him. He introduces the term pictorial anacoluthon, going back to the Greek origin of the term anacoluthon (meaning inconclusive) and its rhetorical use: As with spoken language, there will be mistakes, both in the portrait’s symmetry, and in its sense of completeness. However, what may be considered, at first, a formal mistake may also be a form of expression. However he accomplishes accurate detail.

The first of this series was exhibited at the Museo Contemporáneo de Madrid in 2008.

51 portraits were exhibited at the Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, with the theme of Conflict and Reconciliation in 2009.

He is currently working portraying and recording Holocaust survivors.

More recently, he has become interested in portraits with music and synaesthesia, as his performance with the Toledo Symphony Orchestra.

On Fallingwater En Perspectiva he accepted the invitation to an extended residency with unprecedented access to the building and grounds.