Biography

Juan Bautista Nieto was born in Lora el Rio, near Seville in 1963. The family moved to Seville because of the professional needs of his father, a doctor of medicine.

There he pursued his childhood studies and guided by his father was encouraged from a very early age to become a doctor. However, everyday on his way to school he passed a professional painter's studio and through the window observed the artist at work. Thus began his secret fascination for painting and drawing which he suppressed because of the family's pressure to follow his father's profession.

He studied at the Faculty of Medicine in Seville where as part of his tutorial programme he came into daily contact with inert and anonymous bodies. In later years this was to prove a formative influence on his understanding and appreciation of the human anatomy.

On the death of his father, Nieto made a milestone decision giving up medicine in favour of his secret passion for painting and drawing. In earnest he began to draw and paint initially studying privately on his own but then embarked on a series of studies at the Fine Arts Faculty of Seville. Subsequently he travelled to Madrid where he had the opportunity to meet and visit the studios of some of the main exponents of Spanish Realism such as Toral, López and Naranjo. This encounter became another milestone which determined his technical and expressive preferences leading ultimately to his singular interpretation of hyper-realist painting.

His work presents an exaggerated obsession with recreating a reality which reaches beyond the precise representation of a photograph. He transcends the theme and concept of hyperrealism using it as a vehicle to take us onto another level wherein he achieves an extraordinary kind of intensity which paradoxically creates a distinct feeling of unreality.

His technique is equally obsessive and both demanding and exhaustive. Every facet of his subject is depicted with a minute and impersonal exactitude of detail. His materials are oil and acrylic combined with air brush techniques employed to build an accumulation of delicate and continuous layers of shades and multiple tones of light, shadows and density.

"Perfection is not small , but it is made out of small things"

Michelangelo Buonarroti

In common with other hyperrealist painters he produces very few paintings each year. His large works take between six to nine months to complete. With some justification Nieto is regarded within Spanish Art circles as one of the foremost exponents of hyperrealism in Spain today. His works are in constant demand by museum curators throughout Spain and as a consequence he has been exhibited and admired alongside the likes of Picasso, Dali and Botero.

Juan Bautista Nieto has also worked in literary illustration and authored two technical manuals, "Advanced drawing techniques" and "Supports, backgrounds and media ", still to be edited.

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