20^th-21^st Century, Spanish

After training at the School of Arts and Crafts of Vitoria, Santos Iñurrieta soon made a name for himself in the local avant-garde art scene, and was a regular at Klin, a Vitoria-based art collective.

Iñurrieta had his first exhibitions in the 1970s, with a special mention with those held at Fundación Faustino Orbegozo Eizaguirre, towards the end of the decade, as part of the Erakusketa touring exhibition project. In 1980 he presented his work at the Bilbao Contemporary Art Fair.

This artist is part of a generation of painters who followed the line of work opened by other earlier artists, like Carmelo Ortiz de Elgea (1944) and Juan Mieg (1938). While starting out from abstraction, his work became more and more interested in social issues. The human figure began to move to the centre of his concerns, and in the following years would become the core axis of Iñurrieta’s practice.