Nerea Azanza
Nerea Azanza is a Paris-based emerging Spanish visual artist. She holds a Ph.D. in Fine Arts and an MFA in Conservation-Restoration of Cultural Heritage from the Fine Arts Faculty of the Complutense University of Madrid (UCM).
Back to making art in 2018, her work has been exhibited and published by galleries in Europe and the USA. In 2021, she had her first online solo show with Galerie Estrella. She is a finalist in the "Clavecin en France" Art Contest 2022, organized in collaboration with the Unterlinden Museum (France), and a semi-finalist in the COCA PROJECT 2020 (Italy).
I call my vision Art in expansion. I make figurative abstract paintings divided into modules. These figures reunited in the form of installations, suggest the pieces of a puzzle that I am trying to connect using bold color compositions and organic, precise freehand lines. I want to defy the viewer's credulity in the abstract artistic field. To do so, I paint these high-definition machine-quality lines by hand.
My art is about the instant, an innate rhythm where the apparent complexity gets reduced into a dynamic flow. I challenge spatial limitations to show that the world is a whole in movement. The beginning and the end of things always find a point in common. Besides the disruptions and impermanence, the system shows a capacity for transformation that proves resilience. Everything lives in expansion, differentiated and connected at once.
Studying Japanese aesthetics, Mother Nature's behavior and the Human Condition's tribulations are constant sources of inspiration. Important influences are Joseph Albers, Eduardo Chillida, the hard-edge painting movement, the architecture of Zaha Hadid, and contemporary parametrical design.
I follow an intuitive and experimental artistic process. Without sketch support, each artwork begins with a small image that I gradually expand in space. They acquire a larger scale. It can be a portrait drawn using colored pencils, an embroidered black and white photograph, or a little collage that grows through lines. I mainly use mixed media techniques on paper, wood, linen, and eco-friendly handcrafted textiles.
