Artist Bio

Juan Oyarbide (b. 1979, San Sebastián, Spain) is an architect and artist whose work navigates between the visionary realm of architecture and the expressive immediacy of painting.

He grew up in San Sebastián, where he studied architecture and sold his first paintings, while immersed in the city’s cultural life. Influenced early on by the sculptural power of Chillida, the philosophical explorations of Oteiza, and the gestural abstraction of Balerdi, shaped his understanding of form, rhythm, and space—an influence that continues to resonate throughout both his architectural and artistic practice.

At 30, Oyarbide moved to London to pursue a Master’s degree at The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, graduating with distinction. His path then led him to Tokyo, where he worked with Tetsuo Furuichi on the Jōmon Museum in Fukushima, before returning to London to spend almost a decade at Heatherwick Studio. There, he collaborated as a senior architect in projects such as Google’s headquarters in London and California and the Nanyang Learning Hub in Singapore, within a studio internationally recognized for its innovation. Today, as Associate Director at Prior + Partners, he leads major masterplans across the UK, Middle East, and the Americas, shaping visions for future cities and communities.

For Oyarbide, architecture is more than the act of building—it is a way of seeing. Like a doctor who reads the body through organs and nerves, an architect perceives the layers beneath a road, the balance of forces in a bridge, the rhythm of brickwork, or the interplay of mass and light that creates intimacy or monumentality. Yet architecture begins in imagination: in drawings, masterplans, and visions that often remain unrealized. His painting practice emerges from this same imaginative ground, offering a space where ideas can take immediate form, unbound by the constraints of construction.

For over a decade Oyarbide has developed a body of work that he describes as the counterpart to his architectural practice. Where architecture gives protagonism to spaces designed for people, his paintings invert the relationship: here it is the human figure, with all its emotions and vitality, that takes centre stage, while space recedes as the stage upon which life unfolds. Anatomy and movement play a central role in his work, reflecting his belief that it is human life itself he seeks to capture through paint.

Oyarbide’s influences span the monumental scale of art history: the immersive large scale works of Tintoretto, Michelangelo, Monet, and Picasso; the murals of Diego Rivera, José María Sert, and Orozco; and the masters of the human figure, from Michelangelo and Caravaggio to Ingres, Rodin, Francis Bacon, and Jenny Saville. He fantasises about an art that operates at the scale of architecture, enveloping space just as murals and monumental canvases once did.

Across both architecture and art, Oyarbide pursues the same questions: how light, form, and structure can hold human experience, and how imagination translates into spaces—whether those spaces are cities yet to be built or bodies captured on canvas.