Diana Larrea

Diana Larrea - Mandalas about women artists

Artist Biography:

 

This work proposes a personal exercise of revaluation of some already recognized female artistic references. With the idea of projecting a reinforced and vindicated image of female plastic artists, I elaborated this series of drawings constructed in the form of a mandala, inspired by the work of some of the great essential masters in the history of 20th century art. The artists I chose are: Louise Bourgeois, Frida Kahlo, Hanne Darboven, Georgia O'Keeffe, Patricia Gadea, Lygia Clark and Ana Mendieta. The visual elements I worked with to compose these drawings were symbolic images extracted from the artistic universe of these seven artists. I made a selection of symbols that appear recurrently in the artistic production of these artists and that are intimately identified with their work. In this way, I intended to reconstruct a powerful frame of reference in which to become aware of the influence exerted by the work of the great masters and to reaffirm their mythification. The psychologist Carl Gustav Jung studied the mandala symbol for years and defined it as an archetype, that is, a timeless universal symbol that has not been culturally inherited, but resides in our psyche in a biological way. For this reason, the structure of the mandala is a powerful representation that is repeated in different civilizations. We see it in megalithic circles, Mayan healing rituals, or the rosettes in the stained glass windows of Gothic cathedrals. The mandalic pattern is also found in Nature: in the cellular structure with its central nucleus, the solar system, the design of our ocular iris, the spider's webs or the crystals of ice molecules.