CARTAGENA (MURCIA), 11 (EUROPA PRESS)
The Peruvian artist Cecilia Paredes, considered a reference figure in contemporary art, visited the Domus room of the Pórtico in Cartagena on Tuesday to give a guided tour of her photographic exhibition titled ‘A Distant Garden,’ as reported by municipal sources in a statement.
Attendees were able to learn firsthand about the details of the works that make up the exhibition, open to the public until April 20 with free access, subject to capacity.
«‘A Distant Garden’ is related to my approach to nature, but the title also fits perfectly with Cartagena and the room where we are,» explained Paredes, referring to the Roman excavations located in the municipal exhibition room, which also had a garden from the era, next to the Roman Theater.
The activity was attended by the Director General of Culture of the City Council, Eugenio González, and the exhibition’s curator, Blanca Berlín.
The gallery owner highlighted the collaboration with the City Council to offer the exhibition in Cartagena and emphasized Paredes’ artistic figure. «She is a multifaceted artist who not only does photography but also works in textiles, sculpture, and photoperformance, the discipline we can see in this exhibition, where she is the model for the challenging process of creating the works,» she said.
«Not counting the previous sessions for each work, we started each day at 7 in the morning, and at three in the afternoon, we began the photo session,» Paredes detailed to explain how each photoperformance piece is created.
She also highlighted how guided tours bring the public and creator closer, stating that «when the artist explains it to you, you can go one step further; it is a pleasure to detail each of the works.»
Thanks to this painstaking work, the exhibition brings together dozens of photographs in which the artist expresses her definition of nature through her body and the use of techniques like body painting to blend into the composition and create pieces where Paredes blends with the environment, which typically includes richly ornamented textile patterns. In this way, the protagonist almost disappears before the viewer’s eyes.
CECILIA PAREDES
Cecilia Paredes is a multimedia artist who lives and works in Philadelphia (United States), where she is a visiting professor at the University of Pennsylvania. She studied Fine Arts at the Catholic University of Lima and during her student years, she was actively involved in political activism. In 1983, at the age of 33, she had to exile to Mexico.
This forced migration deeply influenced all her work. In 1988, she left Mexico to continue her artistic studies in Europe, at the Cambridge Arts and Crafts School in England and the Scuola del Nudo in Rome. She later returned to Costa Rica, where she would live for the next 25 years, developing a strong commitment to nature and the environment.
Her work has been exhibited in places like the Tabacalera Promoción del Arte in Madrid, the Hermitage Museum, or the Museum of Photography in Colombia. She has received various international awards, such as the ’40th Street Award’ in Philadelphia, the Best Foreign Artist Award in Santiago de Chile in 2009, the Excellence Award at the Pingyao Photo Festival in 2014, the Julián Castilla Collection Award at the Estampa Contemporary Art Fair in Madrid, and the Ibero-American Prize in Toro in 2022.
