PATAGONIA LANDSCAPES

WORKS ON PAPER

MARIA JOSE CONCHA

(b. Chile, 1979)

Studied Fine Arts at Universidad Católica de Chile

 Maria Jose Concha lived for 7 years in the Chilean Patagonia, the world’s southernmost landscape, an experience, which transformed her work and becomes the focus of her expressive painting. Concha’s work takes those typical phenomena of the landscape and reconstructs, sometimes deconstructing them, into elements, which belong to the painting process. "The landscape is transmuted into painting, and the painting into the essence of the landscape."

 Concha has been in several solo exhibitions and has participated in collective art shows in Chile, Argentina and the USA, including “Thresholds 2006”, an exhibition of the most outstanding final projects of the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile’s Fine Arts Majors for the previous year, "Arte Ayuda" (2006, 2008 - 2011), "Land Shape" (Santiago, Chile, 2007), "Terra Nova" (Decorazon Gallery, USA, 2007), Collahuasi Art Exhibition Hall, (Iquique, Chile, 2010), "Paene-Umbra / Almost-Shade" (Santiago, Chile 2010), "Material / Landscape" an exhibition at the Art Gallery of Cecilia Palma, Santiago de Chile (2011), artist group show at the Angela Royo Latin American Art Gallery, New York City (2011), and a solo exhibition: "Land of Light and Shade" in the Patagonia (Coyhaique, Chile, 2011). She has also participated in numerous international art fairs including AAF New York City (2008-2015), AAF London Battersea & Hampstead Heath (2011-2015), The Affordable Art Fair Hong Kong (2013-2015), Red Dot Art Fair London (2008), and Bridge Art Fair Miami (2008).

 Concha’s painting has been distinguished in various competitions, winning the Fondart Region of Aysén competition in 2007, and obtaining “honorable mention” in the first version of the contest “Teraike: Painting the Patagonia” (Chile, 2007), with her work entitled “Final Landscape” (2008, Coyhaique, Patagonia, Chile).

 “Maria José Concha’s aesthetic notion of the landscape takes her to a formal purity. The relationship that she establishes with nature becomes translated into essential landscapes. The elements are arranged in a strong horizontal structure where, many times, the principal note is a solitaire Patagonic Tree. With great refinement it becomes abstracted… The reduction of the chromatic spectrum and the gesture and rhythm of the brushstroke show a mature formal conception and give an unusual expressive power to her work.”

(Beatriz Huidobro Hott, Chilean Curator, text from catalogue “Final Landscape” Exhibition, 2008)

 “The important point of this artist's proposal is the methodological relationship with the material painting. This painting is gestural and certainly informal but, because of the rigor that the artist gives to the painting through the gesture, it elaborates a visuality which, while decomposing the canonical representation of the landscape painting, gets closer towards a speculation, which shows a different manner and a different attitude in her gaze when she faces the natural model or the imagined nature”.

(Gaspar Galaz, Chilean Artist and Art Critic, extract from text “Collahuasi Art Exhibition Hall”, January, 2010)

 ... "The canvases of Maria Jose Concha, meanwhile, provide views of nature under the uncertain light of dawn, dusk, abstracted, simplified into its most essential components" ...

Excerpt from the critique of the "Paene-Umbra / Almost-Shade" exhibition. Section E of "El Mercurio" Newspaper, November, 2010. Chile, Waldemar Sommer, Art Critic.

— MARIA JOSE CONCHA, 2012

MARIA JOSE CONCHA - PORTFOLIO (PDF)