LÓPEZ BALZA, Laura

The works by Laura López Balza narrates her own life experience, expressed through an inner world made up of dreamlike fables of nature and landscape, of the rural environment or the everyday. They are minimal stories remembered, imagined, lived or idealised, reflecting longings, preferences and fears. They represent a cycle – that of life and death – and a hymn to the joy of living, the search, the knowledge of the world, of their own reality.

Her work on Senegal began in 2017, after a stay of several months in Palmarin, a fishing village on the coast, and her discovery of the country of the teranga (spirit of hospitality), where the everyday is confused with a paradisiacal garden populated by lush, colourful, almost unreal vegetation. Her gaze seeks magic in everything she observes and her infinite capacity for surprise is reflected in paintings that are sometimes enigmatic. They are small stories with which she fixes in her memory everything that has happened, assuming that the reality is often mixed with the imagination in this country.

She deals with themes such as nature, rites and traditions or its mysteries of animist origin, directing her gaze to the light and the sublime of landscapes brimming with colour. These works speak of the fascination for this reality that overflows the given. The aim is to carry out a work reminiscent of anthropologists who embarked on expeditions in a spirit of adventure and discovery.

Laura López Balza holds a degree in Fine Arts from the University of the Basque Country. Between 2007 and 2009 she completed her PhD courses at the University of the Basque Country. In 2016 she graduated in Philosophy at the University of Valladolid. In 2008 she took the course “Art and creativity; towards creative education through art”, Guggenheim Museum of Bilbao. Later, in 2011, “Jornadas de trabajo, Morfología de la naturaleza”, Alcalá de Guadaíra, Seville and an advanced illustration workshop at the Massana School, Barcelona. The year after, “I Curso de Realismo y Figuración para Pintores”, given by Antonio López and Andrés García Ibáñez in Almería. In 2014, the Workshop with Arnal Ballester in Ilustratour, Valladolid.
Among her solo exhibitions are El sueño de los dos pájaros, at Juan Silió Gallery (2022) or Pintar para ver, at La Gran gallery (2018). In Portugal, Mundos, in Ó!Galeria, Oporto (2018); Ó Galeria, Lisbon, in 2016, stand out. Some of the collective exhibitions in which she has participated are Vert-Jaune-Rouge (2018), Instituto Cervantes, Dakar (2016), In/out, Museo Patio Herreriano, Valladolid (2017). In 2016, as selected artist for 31st BMW Painting Prize at Centro Galileo, Madrid. She has been Finalist of the 33rd Muestra de Arte Joven de la Rioja; of XVIII Certamen Nacional de Pintura y Escultura “Ciudad de Melilla”, 2017 and of IV Premio a la producción artística Fundación Banco Santander, 2016. Finalist of the Premio de Artes Plásticas del Gobierno de Cantabria in 2017, she received the prize for Cantabrian artist in 2022.