Lobsang Durney

Lobsang Durney (b. 1976) is a contemporary Chilean surrealist painter whose meticulously rendered oil paintings depict dreamworlds where houses, ships, aircraft, and clocks fuse into single impossible structures. Each canvas is a self-contained story with its own setting, characters, and internal logic, often centered on biomechanical contraptions that hover between the organic and the industrial. The visual language draws directly on the stacked, corrugated-tin hillsides of Valparaíso, the port city that recurs throughout his work.

His path ran through both craft and design. The son of a painter and screen-printer, Durney grew up in the family's advertising workshop learning screen printing and commercial art before qualifying as an architect at Federico Santa María Technical University. That double training — the graphic flatness of the print shop, the structural logic of the drafting table — shows in the precise, buildable impossibility of his machines, which his Chilean gallery compares to Arcimboldo: port materials and machinery recombined into new-old buildings marked by wear and ruin.

His paintings usually begin as a phrase. A single letter turned the hills of Valparaíso into a decade of work — cerro, hill, becomes cerdo, pig — and Chilean proverbs have driven whole series since. "Popular sayings hold great wisdom and much social criticism," he says. Durney resists a single label for the results. Asked whether the work is surreal, post-punk, or dystopian, he prefers "relativist" — art meant to be read freely, "where everything can happen and everything is free of interpretation according to the wisdom of those who contemplate it." He cites Max Ernst on the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table: elements are not obliged to be what they are. "Like the flying funiculars I have painted."

Recognition:

• Concurso Nacional de Pintura "Salón de Viña del Mar". Jury Special Prize, XXXVII edition (2013) and Honorable Mention, XXXVI edition (2011)
• Concurso Nacional de Arte Joven. Honorable Mention, for "Sueño 27-F2"
• District 13 art fair, Hôtel Drouot, Paris — 2022
• Concurso "Mi Ciudad", Municipalidad de Valparaíso. Honorable Mention — 2010
• VII International Watercolor Biennial, Viña del Mar. Selected — 2010
• MAVI, "Cabeza de Ratón," Santiago. Preselected — 2010

Press and Media:

• UCV Televisión, "Encuentros," interview with Marcela Küpfer — 2024
• CULTURIZARTE. "Retornan desde Barcelona a Valparaíso" — 2023
• La Estrella, Valparaíso. "Representa una alianza entre lo topográfico y lo animalesco," by Marcela Küpfer, 5 December 2022, p. 17
• El Desconcierto. "Está mal pelado el chancho: Doble estándar en la sociedad chilena," by Paulo Andrés Carreras Martínez — 21 November 2018
• La Estrella, Valparaíso. "Artistas porteños se ríen del típico doble estándar de los chilenos," by Marcela Küpfer, 19 May 2018, p. 28
• El Desconcierto. "Valparaíso desde los colores de Lobsang Durney" — 16 December 2013

Selected Exhibitions:

• Galería Bahía Utópica, Valparaíso. Five solo shows: "Valporiza2" (2023), "Distopía Alegre" (2019), 2017, "Transportravestivalpo" (2012), "10 megapinceles," his first (2006)
• Sala El Farol, Universidad de Valparaíso and Galería Bahía Utópica. "DobleStandard," thirteen paintings with thirteen sculptures by Pablo Villegas, May–June 2018, and "Embajadores Ensubidores" (2011)
• Musée du Mécanic Art, "Vehicultura." Cazals, France — 2022
• Palacio Vergara, "Cerdos pork-teños," 18 oils. Viña del Mar — 2022. Also at Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez, Viña del Mar — 2012
• Art House SF, "Contemporary Chilean Art," San Francisco — 2021
• Centro Cívico de Vitacura and Hotel Sheraton Miramar, "Animalparaíso." Santiago and Viña del Mar — 2013

Durney's paintings have been placed with private collectors through Art House SF in the United States (San Francisco, New York, New Jersey, North Carolina, Maryland, Florida, Arizona, Ohio) and France.