Emilia Azcárate
Emilia Azcárate’s work is related both formally and conceptually to vital processes, one of which is spirituality. Throughout her life, the artist has had the restless urge to explore different religions and spiritual traditions. Although raised Catholic, in 1986 she underwent initiation in the Hare Krishna religion, and in 2002 she gradually distanced herself from the creed. It was her experience with Hare Krishna that led Azcárate to start to explore ways of articulating her spiritual experience and creating iconographies, both as an epistemological exercise in the understanding of its philosophy and as an articulation of its inherence in her everyday life and in existence as a whole. Owing to its constant connection and relationship between the spiritual and the everyday, the sublime and the mundane, and the body and art, Azcárate’s abstraction cannot be understood as a ‘purist’ aesthetic expression but as a flexible, comprehensive, and multifaceted form capable of including the complex relationship of the spiritual with reality, with her own subjectivity, and with the processes of life.
Azcarate’s work has been exhibited in solo shows at Centro de Arte Los Galpones, Caracas, Casa de América, Madrid, and Sala Mendoza, Caracas, among others. Azcárate has also participated in …
Emilia Azcárate’s work is related both formally and conceptually to vital processes, one of which is spirituality. Throughout her life, the artist has had the restless urge to explore different religions and spiritual traditions. Although raised Catholic, in 1986 she underwent initiation in the Hare Krishna religion, and in 2002 she gradually distanced herself from the creed. It was her experience with Hare Krishna that led Azcárate to start to explore ways of articulating her spiritual experience and creating iconographies, both as an epistemological exercise in the understanding of its philosophy and as an articulation of its inherence in her everyday life and in existence as a whole. Owing to its constant connection and relationship between the spiritual and the everyday, the sublime and the mundane, and the body and art, Azcárate’s abstraction cannot be understood as a ‘purist’ aesthetic expression but as a flexible, comprehensive, and multifaceted form capable of including the complex relationship of the spiritual with reality, with her own subjectivity, and with the processes of life.
Azcarate’s work has been exhibited in solo shows at Centro de Arte Los Galpones, Caracas, Casa de América, Madrid, and Sala Mendoza, Caracas, among others. Azcárate has also participated in group shows at Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Havana, Cuba, Casa de América, Madrid, Berezdivin Collection, San Juan, Puerto Rico, Mercantil Collection, Americas Society, New York, Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno (CAAM), Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain, Prague I Biennial, National Gallery, Veletrzní Palác, Prague, São Paulo XXV Biennial, Cities, Metropolitan Iconography, São Paulo, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Caracas Sofía Imber, Caracas.
Courtesy of Henrique Faira
Sayago and Pardon Collection, Los Angeles, California
Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation (CIFO), Miami, Florida
Fundación Banco Mercantil, Caracas
Fundación Banco Banesco, Caracas
