Maria Peña
HUMAN-N-ATURE, Our First Territory
17 - 28 July 2024
G4
Opening Night
Friday 19 July | 6 - 8pm
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María Peña is a Colombian–Australian visual artist currently based in Melbourne. She studied Bachelor of Fine Arts with a major in painting and ceramics at the Art School Academia Superior de Artes de Bogotá and a Doctorate of Fine Arts by research at RMIT University, School of Art in Melbourne. Her career has developed between Australia and Colombia through solo and collective shows, artist-in-residency programs, and mural projects. Up to now, she has participated in solo and collective shows in Colombia, Australia, Mexico, China, Italy, India, Argentina, New York and the United Arab Emirates.
In this exhibition “HUMA-N-ATURE”, Our First Territory Maria Peña attempts to portray the human figure and parts of nature as a single metamorphosed form, in which sub-realistic faces, hands and feet blend with leaves, flowers and trunks, evoking a unique and original territory.
While creating her paintings and defining the features of the face, hands and feet Peña discovers their similarity to nature, and here they transform into a landscape, a seed, a leaf, a trunk, into water. In Peña’s paintings, the human is no longer detached from nature, he/she is rather evoked as one Huma-N-ature.
In accomplishing her ideas Peña releases control over real human forms in order to discover an intimate dialogue through which messages are transmitted. And here she understands the message: we are the same root, the same seed, the same leaf, the same trunk; it is not that we have been placed into the Earth, it is that we have emerged from her.
Maria Peña believes it is time to turn our eyes inward and feel the quietness and stillness of our seed germinating and breaking away from conventional structures and times. It is time to create our own synchronized realities guided by nature, with her logic, her spaces, and her languages.
Contact
Phone : (03) 9482 3550
mail@redgallery.com.au
Address
157 St Georges Rd
Fitzroy North, Victoria, 3068
Map
How to get here
Tram: route 11
Stop 21 just north of Edinburgh Gardens
Melway ref: 30B12
Parking in nearby streets
Bus: 504 (Reid Street)
