Artist's Biography

Mara De Luca received a B.A. in Visual Arts from Columbia University in 1995 and an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in 2004. As a painter, De Luca’s practice poetically engages with tensions between abstraction and figuration. In Stations (2006-2007), a series of fourteen paintings inspired by Barnett Newman's Stations of the Cross (1958-1964), she layers a disparate array of appropriated images drawn from television, commercial advertising, and Baroque painting on top of meticulously painted canvases of abstract color. Evocative of Newman's own painterly aspirations for "the whole canvas [to] become color and have a sense of light," De Luca's Stations are a meditation on the ideologies of mass media. She continues these explorations in her recent series of paintings that gesture toward the natural landscape and visual culture of Los Angeles. Entitled Sipario (translated from the Italian as "theatrical curtain" or "scrim"), the series comprises atmospheric paintings that mimic digitally-generated imagery; these works might be described as "hyper-analog" representations of light and space. Mara De Luca has been included in numerous group exhibitions at venues including Galerie Chromosome, Berlin; AbstruseSpace, London; and Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, among others. Her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego.