Gabriel Grün is an Argentine figurative painter who paints the human figure, landscapes, mythological scenes and fantastical narratives with the painstaking technique of a renaissance or baroque master. His imagery is often strange, erotic, grotesque – and unmistakably contemporary.

Grün grew up in Buenos Aires and studied at the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes Prilidiano Pueyrredón and the Instituto Universitario Nacional del Arte, graduating in 2003 with a degree in Graphic Design and Multimedia Art. Alongside his formal studies, he trained in the workshops of the Argentine artists Miguel Ángel Bengochea, Víctor Dabove and Elsa Soibelman. His relationship with conventional contemporary art education, however, was short-lived – instead he chose to educate himself through an intensive engagement with the great painters of the past. Among the painters he repeatedly cites are Dürer, Holbein, Rembrandt, Van Eyck, Memling, Caravaggio and Ribera, and he has spoken of being much more at home in the Louvre and Prado than in the Pompidou or Reina Sofía.

That decision became fundamental to his practice. Like his historical mentors, Grün prepares his own paintings with oils and pigments and works slowly, sometimes spending weeks correcting details that his eye finds unsatisfactory. At the same time he describes his paintings as inexorably contemporary. For Grün, the history of painting is not closed. He believes there are ‘holes’ in it, paintings which the old masters might have made had they possessed more time, and which a contemporary painter can still bring into existence. His ambition is ‘to continue the long line of figurative painting with meaning, to be another ring in the chain.’

Gabriel Grün is married and has a daughter, and in a 2024 account of his painting Marcha de Ensueño (Dream March) he describes how the painting grew from a sequence of ideas shared within the family – a sketch that he made, a dream experienced by his wife, and another dream subsequently recounted by his thirteen-year-old daughter. The family had recently undertaken the considerable upheaval of moving from Spain back to his native Buenos Aires, and the symbolism within the painting reflects the challenge and effort involved.

Grün has exhibited extensively in Argentina, Spain, Europe and the United States, including at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Buenos Aires and the Museo Oscar Niemeyer in Brazil. His work is held in collections including the Museo Europeo de Arte Moderno in Barcelona and the Fundación Focus-Abengoa in Seville.

Gabriel Grün’s blog, where he regularly shows new work, can be found here.

Similar artists

Michael Ayrton – British painter and illustrator of mythological subjects.
Jana Brike – Latvian painter of dreamlike, fairy-tale figure scenes.
John Currin – American painter reworking old master technique for contemporary subjects.
Paul Delvaux – Belgian painter of staged figures in dreamlike settings.
Daniel Lezama – Mexican painter of allegorical scenes with baroque staging.
Nazanin Pouyandeh – Iranian-French painter of mythic figure scenes.
Erik Thor Sandberg – American oil painter of grotesque allegory.