Graciela Zúñiga was born in Caracas, Venezuela. Her training was carried out between Venezuela, Germany and Chile, settling in the latter country since 2015. She has developed a diverse and broad artistic career since the 1980s, through drawing, painting, pottery and engraving workshops; also through the exercise of teaching in cultural institutions and active participation as a jury in festivals and art salons. Likewise, she is co-founder and coordinator of Espacio Minimo Galería in Venezuela and Chile. She has participated in numerous collective projects in her native country and abroad, and today her work is part of private collections in many cities around the world.

The artist declares “I have no preconceived idea of what I want to do when I start painting, rather I feel a need to play with color, to see what results from the stains that run through the canvas, how they mix, what they produce” . Although the work of Zúñiga could be formally identified with lyrical abstraction, criticism and the artist herself have also linked it with the representation of the territory. Perhaps because in the playful exercise of her painting, the arrangement of colors and spots that results, it seems to build scenarios that remind us the configuration of a landscape; her compositions refer us to open planes of natural landscapes with mountains and tepuis, suggest sunsets, a wide sea, corals, the nuances of an island or the view of glaciers. Her work is a kind of an abstract, authentic, spontaneous and emotional representation of the spaces we inhabit, illustrating all and none in particular.

Linda D’Ambrosio Morales says that Zúñiga “is shaping in her carefully constructed works, small and shapeless patches of color that are juxtaposed, dissolving one next to the other”. In her pictorial production we notice small visual and metaphorical fields that overlap and merge; the borders are fluid. The discourse responds to the sensibility and creative need of this artist, who is a traveler, is a migrant and conceives the notion of territory as open and transitory.

Ana Beatriz García