Tiergarten, Berlin
Antonio Ballester Moreno
Sun
Tanya LeightonTanya Leighton is delighted to present Sun, a new exhibition by Antonio Ballester Moreno, opening as part of Gallery Weekend Berlin 2026. At a moment when Ballester Moreno’s practice is receiving sustained institutional attention — most recently, a solo exhibition and a new monograph at CA2M — Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo, Madrid — the works presented here offer an intimate point of entry into his world. Over the years, the artist has developed a distinctive visual language, rooted in the symbolism of nature. Painted in vivid reds, pinks, oranges, blues, and greys on untreated jute, the works hold starkness and beauty in tension with one another. The raw surface of the support presses through the paint, insisting on its own presence. The works operate with elemental forms and precise chromatic constellations, engaging with positions of classical modernism in which colour and form were understood as autonomous carriers of meaning. Although formally grounded in abstraction, Ballester Moreno’s practice resonates with traditions of ornament, craft, and folkloric culture, in which nature appears not as an illusionistic landscape, but as a symbolically condensed space of experience. Landscape is not depicted but translated into signs: sun, plants, or clouds become emblematic elements within a precise compositional order. His work shares an affinity with mythic traditions in which landscape and natural cycles serve to condense time, memory, and existential experience. The paintings, therefore, propose a contemporary approach to landscape that intertwines pictorial space and objecthood, carrying the weight of collective memory and origins. The sun is among the most enduring subjects in painting. In ‘SUN’, Ballester Moreno returns to it not as a motif but as a structural principle — a circular form that moves across horizontally layered colour fields, evoking the arc from rising through meridian to disappearance. Subtly modulated bands of colour structure the picture plane like abstracted landscape strata, generating a quiet, rhythmic movement between expansion and compression. The reduced formal vocabulary and carefully calibrated colour contrasts give each work a meditative clarity, while the sun’s inherent ambivalence — a source of all life and a potentially destructive force — resonates with pressing ecological concerns. Three unique bronze sculptures complement the paintings, presented against a warm ochre wall. Cast from cardboard, they evoke dried or withered vegetation while retaining the layered structure of their source material. Like untreated jute, cardboard is a simple material of vegetal origin, whose value is transformed through the act of casting. In casting the disposable into the permanent, Ballester Moreno closes the cycle that the paintings propose. What grows, decays, and returns — transformed but not lost. Antonio Ballester Moreno (b. 1977, Madrid) lives and works in Madrid. Recent solo exhibitions include, among others, ‘El Cielo y La Tierra’ at CA2M, Madrid; ‘Not There – Here’ at Galerie Urs Meile, Zurich; ‘Água (verde)’ at Gomide&Co, São Paulo; ‘The Mountain, The Sky, The Wind, The Sky.’ at Tanya Leighton, Berlin; ‘Nubes (verde)’ at Maisterravalbuena, Madrid; ‘What Can Be Seen From Here’ at Fundación Cerezales Antonino y Cinia, León; ‘Another Day’ at Tanya Leighton, Los Angeles; ‘Autoconstrucción. Piezas Sueltas. Juego y Experiencia’ at Artium – Basque Museum of Contemporary Art, Vitoria; ‘Day’ at Tanya Leighton, Berlin; ‘Ánfora, grotesco, armazón, maniquí’ at Museo Patio Herreriano, Valladolid; as well as a major exhibition at La Casa Encendida, Madrid, accompanied by his first comprehensive monograph ‘¡Vivan los campos libres de España!’. In 2025, Ballester Moreno participated in the 32nd Bienal de Pontevedra in Spain; in 2019, he curated a section of the 33rd Bienal de São Paulo, in which he also took part as an artist. His works are held in numerous public and private collections worldwide, including CIFO – Colección Ella Fontanals Cisneros, Miami; TBA21 – Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Madrid; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; Helga de Alvear Collection, Cáceres; Banco de España Collection, Madrid; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León; Olbricht Collection, Berlin; Louis Vuitton, New York; and CA2M – Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo, Madrid.