Juan Arata’s nihilistic paintings explore the contemporary consumer culture and installation. He states that we are almost completely shaped by the brands we interact with. The characters in Arata’s paintings are miserable, trapped, branded and confused. The miserable, ugly subjects appear to be attempting to copy the lifestyle they have seen depicted in the media but fall short. They are just not good looking enough; they are too unhappy, too stupid or too old. Arata paints swiftly relying on imagination rather than photography, creating works which are psychologically powerful with the depicted people distorted and under duress. The "low-tech", anti- airbrushed beauty is the antithesis of the advertising mystique presented to us all.

Juan Arata is also film and video maker and was selected and shown in over 100 film festivals over the world and awarded in over 40 of them. It was also screened on T.V. and cinemas in different countries of Europe, Asia and the Americas.

As a curator he has worked on many group and solo shows in art spaces in Buenos Aires and Berlin and was also one of the founders and curator of the Arte Comprimido Gallery, also in the city of Buenos Aires.

In other fields he has worked as a professor in the Architect and Design University of Buenos Aires teaching project design and history. He also is the founder of the only distribution company specialized in short movies of South America.

He showed and exhibited his works in the five continents.

Selected:

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Two thousand ten

Chain reaction, MMX Gallery, Berlin, Germany

Atomino Art Festival, Crimmitshau, Germany

Two thousand nine

Signals through the Flames, Galerie Friedrichshöhe, Berlin

This is not an exit, Gallery-33, Berlin

Interzone, Wolterholme Projects, Liverpool, UK