Born in 1974 in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, he earned a degree in Fine Arts from the University of La Laguna and began exhibiting his work in 2002. His pieces have been selected for biennial exhibitions in both Las Palmas and Tenerife, earning prestigious awards such as the Excellens for sculpture from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Miguel Arcángel (2011) and the First Prize “Manolo Millares” from CajaCanarias (2009). In 2006, he held his first solo exhibition titled Buscador de nortes (Seeker of Norths), where, under the motto “where everything is done and everything is yet to be done,” he presented a collection of veiled homages to some of the sculptors he admires, including Brancusi and Giacometti.
Among his notable exhibitions are Antinatura/Sinbiología (Artizar Gallery, 2010–2012) and Osmosis. Blancas + Nicanor (TEA Tenerife Espacio de las Artes, 2015). He also participated in the XII Havana Biennial as part of the project Detrás del Muro (Behind the Wall) with the installation Lemon Way, in which he constructed a path of yellow wooden tiles that crossed the Malecón to terminate in the Caribbean, heading toward Florida.
Throughout 2016 and 2017, he developed the project Neomismos, consisting of two solo exhibitions at Twin Gallery (Madrid) and Artizar Gallery, concluding with an installation presented by Carlos Delgado Mayordomo titled La verdad de Madame Sifira. In 2020, just after the lockdowns, he realized his most ambitious project to date at the Fundación Cajacanarias. Curated by Omar-Pascual Castillo and titled Dile a Caronte que le traigo flores (Tell Charon I’m Bringing Him Flowers), the exhibition was a poetic and sincere reflection on the journey of life and the omnipresence of death.
In 2023, he presented the project De la carne al hueso, del hueso al alma (From Flesh to Bone, from Bone to Soul) at the Atlantic Center of Modern Art (CAAM), where Nicanor proposed a sort of fictional autopsy of the artist himself in an exercise of deconstructing the self. This project continued through the solo exhibitions Después de la calma (Artizar Gallery, 2025) and The Skein of the Soul (Panamerican Art Project, 2025).
Nicanor is a “Brossian” sculptor. One need only look at a few of his works to understand that his creativity strives to give shape to an oeuvre that acts as a caustic alteration of the object and its meaning. He consistently proposes something new and unusual, often postulating a Dadaist position that aligns him with Arp and Duchamp.
His sculptural intensity is poetic in nature. Perhaps that is why his work seems so comfortable and rigorously expressive when he adopts the legacy of the avant-garde—especially Dadaism—and why his ability to create self-sufficient objects and closed entities requires a cultural key for us to communicate with them.
