Malu Ribeiro
Artist, Curator & Educator @ Galeria Eslabón
About Malu - meet the artist!
Malu is an international artist, having lived in nine different countries, speaking five languages, with a BFA in Theatre, an MFA in Visual Arts & Art History, an MA in Education – having taught Visual Arts, Theatre and History of Art at high school, pre-college and college levels for many years-, and an extensive list of group exhibitions, art fairs, and solo shows since the age of 17, as well as a curator-producer of art salons and events. Her record includes grants, awards and honours. She is a process oriented art maker in a visual dialogue with all creatives in this profound tradition; she doesn’t disdain or set herself in opposition to this long history of aesthetic and conceptual investigation. Her main focus is painting and printmaking. For decades, she devoted herself alternating both, but often largely pushing the boundaries of printmaking into installations and continues to develop those projects wherever possible. For Malu, the actual play of elements of aesthetics and materials is an endless field of research, depth, and insatiable rewards. Her goal for the immediate future is to achieve a more comprehensive coherence between both media, in aesthetic, thematic content and conceptual undertones including working in modules in both. She is also creating a multimedia 3D interactive installation project, a secular or universal shrine, Pax Domi, in which ceramics, a medium she has also explored in many phases of her research, is an important component, as it brings an immediate humanistic connection, for both herself and potential audience.
Artist's Research
SUMMARY: In Malu’s abstracted printmaking installations, there are elements of conceptual art, but her main focus has been visual physical and spatial ambiguity, movement, and a sense of the temporal or ephemeral quality of life and nature. While aesthetically very different from her work in painting, there are elements in the latter that function as a catalyst and also, a continuum of those mural installations, for example, her obsession with ambiguity, provided by perspectival distortions, push and pull, textures, and movement, in order to describe an ever-shifting perceptual world, but also at times to show an “elasticity” of time, from passing and unreliable to, at times, an almost frozen stupor. While in the installations there are only 2-3 color-contrast harmonies, such as sepia on blue paper, in the paintings color explodes and becomes part of the narrative, mood, and premonition. Indeed, storytelling takes a forefront priority in her artwork, inspired by people and places, a nostalgic survey of real characters and environments caught in and strangled by the current hectic zeitgeist, which causes their probable extinction in an ever changing world. Past, present, and future collide in a Visual Magical Realism, where aesthetic strokes reveal our very own illusory paradigms.
SOUVENIR GALLERY
MALU RIBEIRO @ Galeria Eslabón
