Life is a Miracle, Sara Malagón Llano
The exhibition Deimos Arte opened yesterday
“With twenty paintings, the Colombian artist Cristina Rodriguez returns to our country to show in Bogotá what has inspired her to paint for more than two decades”
Cristina Rodríguez was born in Bogotá in 1964. She studied Fine Arts in the University of Los Andes and did a Master Degree in Painting at The Slade School of Fine Arts, in London. She was awarded a scholarship by Icetex, the British Council and several times after, by Delfina Studios Trust. She began to paint professionally in 1987.
She has lived in London, New York, Harare and Geneva since 1989, and her studio is currently located in Estoril, Portugal. That way, she has had the chance to take part in seven solo exhibitions and more than thirty group exhibitions all over Europe. Moreover, her work has been featured in diverse art fairs in London, New York, Innsbruck, Amsterdam and Milano.
During her twenty-seven years of work she has painted more than 500 artworks, 470 of which belong now to private, public and permanent collections in different countries all over the world.
Her work constantly attempts at grasping, through minimalist shapes and colours, the extraordinary inside the mundane, the beauty inside the ugliness and the harmony in the disharmony of our own day-to-day reality.
Rodriguez describes herself as a figurative artist. She paints what she sees. So we find within this exhibition, for instance, the image of a lion at the heart of London. It is, really, a monument that goes unnoticed amongst the everyday routine of Londoners. She has done a painting about a parrot she saw several times perching itself on the windows of a house amongst the urban chaos, and a pheasant that crossed the street of a beautiful but tumbledown London borough. She has also had the chance to present a series of paintings narrating the experience of becoming a mother, the most important moments of her son growing up and the relationship that mother and father have with him.
Since her first exhibition –her degree show a series of narrative compositions based on the movements of a concert by the Russian musician Modest Mussorgsky–, she fights tooth and nail for the figurative power of painting –in an era when conceptual art prevails–, for its ability to tell stories, to show in a specific way reality, what surrounds us, the miracles of a life that, sometimes, because we live immerse in routine, used to everything we have easy access to, we stop seeing as miracles.
This exhibition’s title is “From Alps to Andes”. It will stay open from 20th March in Deimos Arte, a gallery specialised on the research of artisan materials used in modern objects, and which works together with cabinetmakers and upholsterers for the creation of silver and leather objects. The exhibition counts with twenty of the artist’s paintings, created in the period 2008-2013. It’s the first exhibition of Rodriguez’s art in Colombia since 1989.