In an explosion of color and force, Puerto Rican artist Marta Pérez García gives life to a feminine world that mutates into savage nature, animal forms, and repetitive patterns. Her work establishes a dialogue with an enduring Caribbean baroque that, more than movement, becomes here erupting screams. Her shapes produce a dance where objects, limbs, eyes, and teeth conspire to create a choreography of continuities and ruptures. Contorted and voracious bodies emerge from a sea of horror vacui. Inevitably, the viewer is compelled to alternate between the majestic images of the whole and the delicate minutia of the detail. Pérez García’s technique of printmaking with a reduction process is in itself a metaphor of the violence of life; carved wood that erodes, gradually transforms into bright pigment, into a luminous blast. The demise of the wood is the birth of the impression.
Marta Pérez García (Arecibo, P.R., 1965) has a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Louisiana State University and a Master of Fine Arts from the Tyler School of Arts in Philadelphia. During a short stay at the University of West Virginia, she learned relief printmaking. She won an award at the Chase Manhattan Bank Biennial of Young Art in 1989 and, in 2001 she received the grand prize at the XIII San Juan Biennial of Latin American and Caribbean Print. She has been awarded a scholarship from the Alfonso Arana Foundation in 2003 to pursue studies in Paris, as well as Artist Fellowships from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities in 2010, 2014, and 2016. Her pieces have been shown in both solo and collective temporary exhibitions, while some became part of permanent collections at The Art Museum of Puerto Rico and the Chase Manhattan Bank in New York, among others. Her work addresses the dichotomies of life and death and oppression and empowerment where elements of nature and symbols of culture intertwine in an unpredictable fusion of fierce colors and layered textures.