Galerie Heike Strelow is pleased to present The Pretender’s Attrezzo, the first solo exhibition in Germany by Venezuelan artist Fausto Amundarain (Caracas, 1992), who lives and works in Madrid.
The exhibition brings together a new series of paintings in which Amundarain explores the relationships between identity, representation, and memory. Created entirely through painterly means, his compositions evoke the language of collage, combining fragmentation, layering, and trompe-l’œil effects to create spaces where image, object, and fiction converge.
Drawing on references from painting, cinema, and stage design, the works examine how individuals construct and project versions of themselves through symbols, characters, and narratives. At the same time, the artist incorporates autobiographical elements and fragments of memory that appear only partially, suggesting ongoing processes of reconstruction and personal transformation.
Amundarain’s practice engages in a dialogue with traditions such as Synthetic Cubism and with artists including Robert Rauschenberg and Sigmar Polke, while developing a distinctive visual language centered on the relationship between painting, space, and perception.
This exhibition marks Fausto Amundarain’s first solo presentation in Germany. His work has been exhibited internationally and is held in public and private collections in Germany, Spain, Switzerland, Sweden, and the United States.
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Fausto Amundarain’s work moves between collage-like painting, staging, and memory. The collage-like pictorial structures are created entirely through painterly means. Layering, fragmentation, and trompe-l’œil elements shift the boundaries between surface and space, image and object. The paintings function as theatrical spaces or cinematic sets in which identities are constructed, concealed, and dissolved.
The exhibition takes as its starting point the question of how people use roles, images, and symbols to protect themselves or reinvent themselves. Identity appears not as a fixed state but as something performative and constructed. Figures move, flee, disappear behind projections, or seek refuge in invented personalities. The works examine the moment when the performance begins to eclipse the person behind it. At the same time, Amundarain opens up a deeply personal pictorial space. Children’s drawings, early wall paintings, and archived traces of the past become starting points for an inner investigation. Memories surface in fragments and remain deliberately incomplete. What becomes visible is not a linear narrative but a process of uncovering, reworking, and reclaiming.
Art-historically, the works reveal connections to Synthetic Cubism as well as to Robert Rauschenberg and Sigmar Polke. Filmic and performative concepts also play a central role. The Italian term attrezzo refers not only to tools and everyday objects but also to props and stage elements in film and theater that define atmosphere, psychology, and character.
Amundarain uses this notion of the prop as a metaphor for the construction of identity, memory, and social visibility.
Fausto Amundarain was born in Caracas in 1992 and now lives and works in Madrid. His work has been shown internationally in exhibitions and institutional contexts, and is held in collections in Germany, Spain, Switzerland, Sweden, and the United States.
