MARÍA DEL CARMEN DÍEZ

MARÍA DEL CARMEN DÍEZ - Menudas Cerdas

Technique: Intaglio linocut

Artist Biography: She has received a grant as an artistic engraver from the Fábrica Nacional de Moneda y Timbre de Madrid, and among her most recent grants are also the Plastic Arts of the Province of Valladolid, Residence for Contemporary Print Bólit Centre d'Art Contemporani and Ema de Girona, Grant for artists of the Artist Book Fair of Castilla y León, among others. He has won several awards including the Carmen Arozena International Graphic Art Award, Certamen de Print José Caballero, EAC Awards, as well as the Open Portfolio Award at the International Fair of Print FIG Bilbao.

 

Visual artist framed in the field of contemporary graphic work, specializing in Print burin and multiple printing techniques. Her work addresses issues related to gender, questions about the evolution of women and their normalized representation obtained by a patriarchal heritage in force. Both in her artistic works and gender research, she proposes an approach to the creation of graphic media as a communicating element that has acted directly in the reproduction, propagation and inheritance of the cultural process that extended certain physiognomic and psychological characteristics of the female gender through the prints. This piece, belonging to "A efectos del ayer y del hoy", is made up of six engravings that present a series of compositions in which women are shown transformed into animals, which are in turn represented under titles coming from the popular saying, where phrases are formulated that use the meaning of animals as pejorative adjectives towards women, creating a situation of dialectic confrontation between the popular language and the animal symbol. These feminine triads dismantle the use of the feminine, highlighting certain archetypes, both visual and lexical, imposed on women from a society that we understand to be already past but that we continue to take as a reference.