Elsa Zambrano began working on her latest series over a year ago, before the pandemic started. Initially, it was meant to consist exclusively of paintings, but in the midst of the lockdown, the series took an unexpected turn. Little by little, objects, postcards, and images that comprise the artist’s personal archive began to resurge and take part in her pieces once more.
Something quite particular about Elsa Zambrano is her desire to pay homage to representative art history figures. This recurring motif remains relevant in her latest series; however, her work begins to evolve through these latest pieces, as she assembles objects of her collection that establish a dialogue with each of the paintings. Elsa Zambrano’s work has always stood out for being figurative, yet she finds abstract art’s spiritual nature to be profoundly fascinating and moving.
The artist associates the title “Constellations” with “star-painters,” and with the constant presence of the sphere in Dadaist artists work, among these, Sophie Taeuber Arp and Sonia Delaunay, abstruse Swedish artist Hilma af Klint, and Colombian artists Carolina Cárdenas and Fanny Sanín. In the case of male artists such as Utamaro, Mondrian, Warhol, Tom Wesselman, Matisse, Picasso, and Modigliani, the female figure is the subject of their works.
It has taken Elsa Zambrano over a year to develop the works that make up this series, which seeks to bring together both processes (painting and assemblage), but maintaining her peculiar vision of the art world.
