Juan Miguel Quiñones

Juan Miguel Quiñones was born in 1979 in Vejer de la Frontera, in the province of Cádiz, and grew up in Estepona, on the Costa del Sol, where he still works. He is self-taught: he left school to work in construction alongside his father, a master builder, then became a marble restorer, learning the stone and its techniques at first hand.

Pop in hard stone

Quiñones specialises in pietra dura, the Florentine Renaissance technique of inlaying semi-precious stones into marble. He applies this patient craft to deliberately light subjects: dripping ice creams, burgers and doughnuts, skateboards, surfboards and game consoles — objects of a 1980s childhood rendered in travertine, alabaster, onyx, lapis lazuli, malachite and jasper. The trompe-l’œil is part of the pleasure, and Claes Oldenburg is an acknowledged reference. He also works with resin, which lets him bring in pure colour.

Exhibitions and collections

After a first solo exhibition in Estepona in 2013, Quiñones showed Con la comida no se juega at the Museo de Arte de Antequera (2017). In 2019 his monumental Drácula ice cream was installed in a public space in Madrid during Urvanity, and the project DRACULA X DRACULA was presented at CAC Málaga. Galleries in Seville, Marbella, Mallorca and London have shown his work. In 2025 the Centro Mirador del Carmen in Estepona devoted Al Origen to him, a survey of more than 180 sculptures, followed in 2026 by Stone Memory: Castles of Sand, his first solo exhibition in Lisbon. His work is in the Pilar Citoler and SOLO collections in Spain.