CRISTINA DE MIGUEL

Originally from Seville, Spain, Cristina de Miguel (b. 1987) lives in Brooklyn, New York. She earned a degree in fine arts from the University of Seville (2010) and a master's in fine arts from Pratt Institute in New York (2012). She uses oil sticks atop acrylic paints that are variously thinned out to achieve a range of atmospheric effects. This approach reveals the artist's interest in the formal contrast between thick and thin lines, opacity and transparency, and velocity and stasis. Sometimes, the artist uses her hands and feet to motivate the paint. Where one would run their hand through their hair, de Miguel runs her own fingers through her figure's hair, which is emphatically and unabashedly paint. The result of the artist's physical intervention is thickly piled painterly zeniths and nadirs that achieve the status of hair. In this way, the paint on de Miguel's canvases become indexes of the artist's own choreographies. The artist paints on her own terms, pushing her formal training to entropic measures. De Miguel insists on paint as at once material and subject. Her recent solo exhibitions include "Wheels, Flying Bodies, And Other Stories," Fredericks & Freiser Gallery, (New York, 2022); "Paintings of Through and Fell," Allouche Benias Gallery, (Athens, 2021); and "Life in Its Poetic Form," Fredericks & Freiser Gallery, (New York, 2020). Her group exhibitions include "REFLECTIONS: PARTLY FICTION," WOAW Gallery (Hong Kong, 2022); Van de Weghe Gallery, East Hampton, New York (2021); Sim Smith Gallery, London (2020); Fredericks & Freiser, New York (2020); and Herrero de Tejada, Madrid (2019). Courtesy of the artist (@cristina_de_miguel)