The idea for the collective, which included the artists Patricia Gadea, Juan Ugalde and Mariano Lozano and the poet Dionisio Cañas, came about during the mid-eighties in New York, where the members of the group were living at the time. Upon returning to Madrid, they founded the group in 1989 and held their first exhibition at the Buades gallery that same year. Until 1993—the year the members went their separate ways—Estrujenbank developed an unorthodox body of work that included several artworks in which painting, photography and advertising seem to interrogate each other with politically acerbic humour. The group’s activity, however, embraced areas as diverse as video, performance or curatorial projects—Cambio de sentido, for example, was an exhibition organised in the village of Cinco Casas in La Mancha. They even created their own museum space, the ‘Sala de Exposiciones Estrujenbank’, located in the group’s collective workspace in Madrid. They held a variety of artistic interventions here, both their own and those created by other artists who were particularly active at the time. The magazine Estrujenbank News was the theoretical medium in which the group published the many commentaries, projects and manifestos produced by its members. 2008 saw the publication of the book Tot Estrujenbank, an absolutely essential guide to understanding the evolution of the group and its leading role in opening up new avenues that diverged from the more commercial and clichéd art of the eighties.