Ara Méndez Murillo (Córdoba, 1997) is a visual artist based in Brussels. She began her studies at the University of Seville (ES), obtaining a bachelor diploma in Fine Arts. Afterwards, she deepened her pictorial practice at the painting department of La Cambre, in Brussels, where she graduated in 2022.
Having studied classical music and fields such as drawing, sculpture and engraving, her practice now focuses on painting, where she develops the dialectic between purely pictorial elements, such as colour or the application of matter, and the meanings of the image represented.

Ara Méndez Murillo recently did a residency at BilbaoArte.

Artist Statement

Ara Méndez Murillo’s painting is undeniably figurative but also essentially abstract. From figuration she draws the capacity to transmit ideas and sensations through the subject represented in the image. From abstraction, a categorical principle in her way of approaching each painting: color, composition and application of the paint must make the pictorial surface an autonomous and valid entity in itself, independent of the forms they represent.

Therefore, each image is selected for a specific reason, whether it be a sensation, a reason linked to compositional or color-related notions, or an idea. Often a conceptual thread serves for the creation of a series of paintings, transforming into symbols the elements depicted in the image. This is the case with game, childhood, sports or signage, recurring themes in her painting and to which she gives a particular meaning. Language, through the creation of texts and titles, completes this aspect of her work.

During the making of the painting, the abstract component gains ground again: intuitively and through the tension between the colors, she creates the illusion of the space necessary for the image to develop.