Rubén Martín de Lucas

He graduated in Civil Engineering from the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid in 2002. Following a journey through India, he decided to pursue art without practicing engineering. In 2001 he had co-founded Boa Mistura, working with the collective on urban art projects until 2015. Since 2015 he has focused on an individual investigation into landscape, belonging and human behavior.

Stupid Borders brings together several of his investigations into nationhood and ownership. In Minimal Republics, he marks out areas of one hundred square meters, establishes geometric borders and inhabits them alone for no more than twenty-four hours. Aerial photographs and video installations record these temporary microstates. The precision of the rules contrasts with the fragility of the occupation, exposing the constructed nature of boundaries.

Iceberg Nations, made in Greenland in 2018, takes this inquiry onto drifting ice: planting a flag and claiming a nation on a surface destined to disappear questions the permanence of political territories. In Bureaucracies, queues of people waiting in empty places turn administrative procedures and restrictions on movement into scenes of estrangement. Photographs from this series featured in Migrations, une odyssée humaine at the Musée de l’Homme in Paris (2024–2025).

His painting develops these questions through gesture and material. The Garden of Fukuoka takes its cue from the Japanese farmer and thinker Masanobu Fukuoka. Against the regular repetition associated with monoculture, his gardens bring together marks, densities and open spaces that evoke a less controlled natural world. The series invites us to see the painted surface as a territory in which order, diversity and growth coexist.

In La traza vacía, interventions on images of territory mark the footprint of human occupation and the space it leaves for other species. Transgenic Days expands this inquiry through paintings, texts, sound installations and actions. An ongoing project, it addresses domestication and our growing distance from nature; its different languages accumulate, inviting slower attention to the world we inhabit.

His solo exhibitions include presentations at CAB in Burgos (2017–2018), the Lianzhou Museum of Photography in China (2019), Gallifet in Aix-en-Provence (2020) and Kunstverein Augsburg (2023). In 2019 he received the Audience Award and Tribew Award at Circulation(s), Paris. The Fundación María Cristina Masaveu Peterson holds El jardín de Fukuoka XXXIV (2017), an example of his painting in institutional collections.

At Marquesa Gallery, Domesticarse o morir (2025–2026), curated by Javier Cruz, explored the relationship between adaptation, freedom and control. Connected to Transgenic Days, the exhibition used painting and text to consider how domestication shapes both ecosystems and human ways of life. His recent career also includes The Quiet Between (2026), a joint exhibition with Toni Garau at Gallery RED, Palma.