Manuela Garcia, born in Medellín, Colombia 1982 and based in Mexico City, holds a BA in Fine Arts from the National University of Colombia and was part of the MA program in Visual Arts at the Brera Academy in Milan, Italy, in 2009. García recently presented her solo show at Efraín López Gallery, in New York, USA. She exhibited at Peana Gallery, Mexico City, Mexico (2022), and Parsons Gallery, New York City, USA. Additional recent exhibitions include König Galerie Mexico City (2024), Anahuacalli Museum, Mexico City (2023), Fundidora Museum, Monterrey (2021), Temporary Gallery, Cologne (2015), and Chopo Museum, Mexico City (2015).

Manuela García is a multi-disciplinary artist whose work engages with the dynamics of space. Her sculptures, for instance, explore our navigation and perception of the body and spatiality. Her paintings, however, engage with a more atmospheric and psychological understanding of space, using subtle shifts in tone, texture and composition to evoke feelings of absence, memory and the passage of time. Through both mediums, García’s ractice emphasizes space as something fluid and heuristic, shaped as much by what is present as by what is left unsaid.

García’s paintings resist the clarity and directness often associated with geometric abstraction. Working primarily with encaustic, she builds her surfaces through a process of layering beeswax and pigment, allowing colour and form to emerge gradually. With its natural translucency, the material itself lends a sense of depth whilst also concealing the means of its construction. This deliberate withholding of definition, where edges blur and colours dissolve, reinforces a central concern in her work: the instability of perception. Whether evoking a softened horizon, a luminous threshold, or visceral plane of space, García’s compositions refuse to settle into fixed interpretations.

This embrace of ambiguity extends to her treatment of the picture surface. The wax coating creates a subtle interference, both obscuring and heightening the painting’s materiality. The surface can recede into an atmospheric haze or assert itself as a physical barrier that resists entry or movement. This dynamic echoes García’s own approach to image-making, which favours quiet disruption over direct affirmation. Her work does not directly depict the violent histories she grew up around in Colombia in the 1980s and ‘90s, but it offers a speculative retreat from political unrest and cartel violence. In place of rupture and chaos, García composes a language of restraint, where balance, repetition, and meditative stillness emerge in quiet yet deliberate whispers.

In „Mediating Forms“, her first solo presentation in New York, García deepened this exploration. Across a series of encaustic paintings, she refines her use of colour and spatial relationships, developing a visual rhythm that is at once minimal but highly immersive. Works such as „De la serie pinturas de cera, Silla“ (2023) and „Persistencia de la luz #16“ (2023) exemplify her ongoing engagement with the limits of visibility, where forms emerge and dissolve, and where the act of looking becomes a negotiation of both proximity and distance.

Albie Fay