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Luz Lizarazo

Luz Lizarazo

1966, Bogotá

Throughout her multi-decade career, Lizarazo's poetic and political oeuvre has developed a distinctive visual language that confronts the systemic subjugation of the female voice and body, creating a space that recognizes and celebrates female autonomy, sexuality, and liberation.  Lizarazo's artistic practice employs an intermedial approach that inhabits her drawings, watercolors, paintings, sculptures, embroideries, and environmental installations. Furthermore, her work engages with a heterogeneous, often unconventional, range of materials: glass, ceramics, wood, bones, wool, human hair, and dramatically varying scales—from monumental to fragmental. Representational of Lizarazo's practice is the depiction of the fragmented body, both inside and outside, portraying it in vulnerable yet poignant manners, including a series of ethereal yet disquieting pieces investigating the body's skin, organs, and orifices. The series Skin (2017-2021), an iconic set of works with stockings as a metonymy of human skin, delicate and elastic, was conceived from her deep interest in the largest organ in the human body. Each individual's skin rises as singular cartography; a thread that stretches, shrinks, changes color, texture, adheres, repairs itself, sickens, scars, and cures. It is a system that communicates the intimate visceral with the foreign environment, revealing the tension between the physical body and its surrounding space, between what is inside and what is outside. In this series, Lizarazo synthesizes startling and often ambiguous imagery with decorative and craftlike elements, blending the ethereal and the aggressive, which is another theme in her work. Eugenio Viola *Photograph by Federico Bottia

I bring to light the contained force of the feminine, as a power tied to nature, life and the life processes of women as containers and creators. A force that explodes with all its power when through the work the characters recover their voice, visibility, words, the healing process. I use animals as living beings that allow me to connect with an internal and diverse world, which is the true world for me and also makes visible the inequality between the feminine and the masculine, in a society in which machismo and patriarchal culture has more voice than ours, that of women.

Works