As an architect, artist and researcher, his work revolves around the practice of study and manufacture regarding the reconstruction, repetition and reinterpretation of a regressing pre-modern culture. Diego Delas addresses some vernacular architectural designs, those related to narrative and magical thinking, those that embody notions with a certain modernist drive.

Delas graduated in Architecture and Fine Art in Madrid before moving to London, where he later received an MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art and a PhD from the Ruskin College of Art (University of Oxford). He has also received prestigious scholarships and awards such as the AHRC Doctoral Training Partnership from the University of Oxford, and more recently the Botín Foundation scholarship. His work has also been selected for the Thyssen Bornemitzsa Foundation, TBA21-Academy, Cervezas Alhambra Award for Emerging Art, Paulo Cunha e Silva Award, Generación Award, Montemadrid Foundation Award, BARCU Fair in Bogotá, Lucy Halford Bursary, Windfall Bursary and RCA (HEFCE) Student Bursary for the Royal College of Art in London, among others.

The artist has featured his work as part of solo and group exhibitions worldwide, and some of them have even been acquired by collections such as the MUSAC (Castilla y León Museum of Contemporary Art), Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary - TBA-21, the Montemadrid Foundation, the DKV Collection, the Kells Collection and the Cervezas Alhambra Collection, to name a few.

Diego Delas, with his textiles, installations and paintings, he approaches the artistic practice as a medium with which to question certain ways of being in the world that no longer exist (rural, pre-modern ways), in which animals and humans coexisted on the same plane: home, work and the natural cycles of life and death. He reflects on a pre-modern era in which the artistic object was linked to the domestic world (marks, drawings and inscriptions for good luck) and belonged to secular matters and the rituals thereof.

Delas' work emulates an amalgam of processes where an interest in vernacular architecture, the idea of labour and the anthropology of manual, magical and secular aspects converge. This is how he imitates the function of talismans and amulets, using not only construction materials but also materials inherent to domestic work (such as patchworks and reclaimed fabrics).

Diego Delas, 2020. Image by Sergio Albert.