Artist Bio

Juan Oyarbide is an architect and artist whose work navigates between the visionary realm of architecture and the expressive immediacy of painting.

For over twenty years, Juan Oyarbide has worked as an architect and masterplanner on major cultural, civic, and urban regeneration projects across Europe and internationally. Alongside this professional practice, he has developed an independent and sustained artistic body of work focused on the human condition within the urban environment.

Drawing from Basque, Spanish, and broader European artistic traditions, Oyarbide’s work bridges architectural thinking with painterly expression. His practice positions the human figure as a human-scale counterpoint to architectural systems, exploring how bodies inhabit, endure, and reshape the city — our most common yet complex habitat.

For more than a decade, while contributing to the shaping of cities through architecture, Oyarbide has documented their emotional and social undercurrents through painting, drawing, and mural work. These parallel practices converge in URBO, a long-term artistic investigation into coexistence, identity, and collective life within contemporary urban space.

URBO: Urban Bodies marks Oyarbide’s professional artistic debut, bringing together two decades of architectural experience and a deeply personal artistic exploration into a unified visual language.