Rubén Navarro

In the historic centre of Cuenca, in an 18th-century house on the little street of Severo Catalina, you'll find the workshop-gallery of Rubén Navarro. He represents the second generation of one of the city's most celebrated pottery dynasties. His father Adrián Navarro opened the workshop here in 1969 and became one of the legends of Cuenca ceramics. Rubén grew up in this space from childhood, and by the age of thirteen was already selling his own pieces, each one signed by hand.

Rubén has studied artistic and contemporary ceramics and printmaking at several schools, shown his work in dozens of exhibitions in Spain and abroad, and collected numerous awards and honours along the way. Today, alongside his work in the studio, he teaches at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Castilla-La Mancha, right here in Cuenca.

He works across several techniques. Sgraffito, for instance, is a traditional Cuenca method: a coloured layer is applied to the piece, then a fine design is scratched through it with a sharp tool, revealing the contrasting clay beneath - the result looks almost like engraving on clay. Transfer printing involves pressing real images - photographs or drawings - onto the raw clay using special paper. And his newest passion is ceramic pencils and chalks that survive firing at over a thousand degrees, producing pieces with drawings that feel as fresh and spontaneous as pencil sketches on paper.

The gallery carries both artistic one-off pieces - with mythological scenes that Rubén reinterprets and blends with characters and stories of his own invention - and affordable everyday objects: vases, mugs, tableware for daily use. No two pieces are the same.