Artist: Elizabeth Ibarra
Venue: Tatjana Pieters, Ghent, Belgium
Date: October 31, 2020 – January 17, 2021
Photography: Artuur Vandekerckhove / all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Tatjana Pieters
Word from the artist : Hello people, to say a few words here and there, will only detract of our first introduction. May we enjoy each other with our presence, first in silence. Later, … perhaps, I will verbally communicate a little more. Nice it is to meet you. Love, Ibarra.
Elizabeth Ibarra’s creative explorations take form in painting, works on paper, mixed media sculptures and assemblages of tree branches she calls “Sunday Findings”. Through bold colours and expressionist gestures, Ibarra’s work refers to ideas of life beyond Earth and is unified through a sense of magic and haunting. Her pictorial representations of the figure are recognisably human but they also bare a strangeness, an unidentifiable alien nature. In doing so, Ibarra conjures a hybrid form of human and alien life and through gestural brushstrokes she gives them a sense of movement and brings these bodies to life. Ibarra’s hybrid forms could represent extraterrestrial beings, the experience of being a foreigner with an outside perspective or simply the feeling loneliness. However they are interpreted, Ibarra’s works are sensitive yet satirical in their mystical nature and provoke questions about human existence on planet Earth.
Ibarra was born in Mexico in 1986 and now lives in Los Angeles. Although her work bares resembles to modern masters such as Joan Miro, Louise Bourgeois, J. M. W. Turner as well as a nod to Romanticism, Ibarra did not undergo a formal education. Instead, her stylistic development was independent and inspired by the connectivity and simplicity of images and cosmology.
