Lost Identity Exhibition: The Porch Upstate 2023

In an increasingly globalized -and globalizing- reality, returning to identity has been central to my painting. Portraiture has become a search for the imperfect beauty of everyday life. 

My works are a celebration of that in-between space between the public and the private: human relationships, social norms, emotions, self-awareness imperfection, incompleteness and the ability to find a place in the world that resembles who we are. From the use of photographs of popular culture and my surroundings my paintings become imaginary of what my own experience is. 

Halfway between the private and the collective, patterns, abstractions and figuration are part of the amalgam of my voice, in constant mutation. Rather than an in-depth examination of the visual language of painting within contemporary visual culture, my work explores the simple trace of timeless everydayness in which different ways of being in the world converge.

Amaia Marzabal’s work inquires into the role of female artists along history, which is often regarded for its functional creation process, without being delineated as art or craft. Many of these works have helped at the same time to redefine and re-contextualize new ways of creating, and generating new narratives, concepts, in spite of being out of the circles of the world art. Marzabal’s project is at once motivated by a desire to recover craft as a means of creation, not just of femininity, and an investigation of Basque craft and identity in a global frame.

NARS Foundation, Brooklyn NY