Location: Oakland, CA
Medium: Painting, textiles, sculpture
Website: nazariancurcio.com
Maria A. Guzmán Capron was born in 1981 in Milan, Italy, to Colombian and Peruvian parents, and relocated to Texas as a teenager before settling in the Bay Area, where she has lived and worked in Oakland for nearly a decade. She received her BFA in painting from the University of Houston in 2004 and her MFA from the California College of the Arts in 2015, where she was the recipient of the Graduate Painting Fellowship. She co-founded CTRL+SHFT Collective, an exhibition space and studio in West Oakland that centered underrepresented arts communities, and works as a facilitator at NIAD Art Center, a progressive studio for artists with disabilities.
Her work is in the permanent collections of the de Young Museum, the Speed Museum in Louisville, and the Jorge M. Pérez collection in Miami. She is represented by Nazarian/Curcio in Los Angeles (formerly Shulamit Nazarian), and has exhibited at SFMOMA, the Blaffer Art Museum, the Contemporary Jewish Museum, and internationally at Public Gallery, London.
Guzmán Capron builds large, commanding textile sculptures and wall works by stitching together vivid, often recycled fabrics — cotton, velvet, silk, linen — with airbrushing and paint, constructing fantastical hybrid figures that collapse the boundaries between self and other, body and landscape, the figurative and the abstract. Her "beyond-human characters," as she calls them, are sinuous bodies in motion and repose whose exaggerated limbs, fingers, and legs merge and entangle to the point where individual figures become indistinguishable. The work emerges from her experience of toggling between multiple cultures and geographies — Italian by birth, Colombian and Peruvian by heritage, Texan by upbringing, Californian by choice — and the competing desires to assimilate and to be seen that this generates. Privileging off-cut and discarded fabrics becomes a metaphor for centralizing what society undervalues.
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