Donna Huanca (b. 1980, Chicago, IL) is a Bolivian-America multidisciplinary artist living and working in Berlin. She studied at Städelschule, Frankfurt, the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts Painting from the University of Houston. Huanca’s work spans painting, sculpture, and immersive performance in a rich practice thematizing the elemental via different landscapes and ecological systems. Exploring an interest in the natural cycles of birth, death, and time across mediums, her practice reintegrates previous works into the new—obscuring and expanding the lifespan of her paintings, sculptures and performances. A Fulbright scholar, the artist has exhibited numerous solo presentations throughout the world including Espejo Quemada at Marfa Ballroom (Marfa, TX); the Zabludowicz Collection, London; Yuz Museum, Shanghai; Belvedere Museum, Vienna; and Copenhagen Contemporary, Copenhagen. Her work is featured in prominent international collections including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Collection, New York; Sifang Art Museum, Nanjing; the Rubell Museum, Miami; and the Perez Art Museum, Miami (PAMM) among many others. Solo exhibitions at Dallas Contemporary; Arnolfini, Bristol; and Henry Gallery at the University of Washington, Seattle are forthcoming.
KARITA DE DIOSA, named for a genus of spiders in Huanca’s home, is a new work pulled from a part of her site-specific, multimedia performance and installation at Copenhagen Contemporary, Lengua Llorona (2019). Translating to ‘crying tongue’ from Spanish, the exhibition space was transformed through a series of live painting actions. The performances mutate the space into a powerful, vibrant, sensory universe from her and her performer’s anthropomorphic gestural markings that bend and refract the physical experience in the newly abstracted space. Relying on raw color pigments, oils and other natural, even bodily, materials, her flowing, sweeping abstraction taps into humanity’s physical interconnectedness. Through these vibrant reds and dreamy royal blues, she translates and documents the biochemical heritage and the cultural history of the body. The artist has hand-embellished the work with additional details and texture in oil pastels, making each print a unique work.
“Growing up, the art world didn’t feel relevant or accessible to me. A major goal of my practice has always been to create space for those that don’t feel welcome in art institutions, and that is the work that Artadia is also doing,” shared Huanca on the collaboration. “Recognizing the important role that art can have for our communities and our society, whether that be through staging encounters or reframing something that is unquestioned in our culture to imagining new constellations and ways of being, I really admire how the organization gives artists the opportunity to fully explore and develop their creative practice without the pressure of the art market.”
ART FOR CHANGE will donate a portion of proceeds from each print sold to Artadia in support of the organization’s initiatives providing unrestricted grants to visual artists working at pivotal moments in their careers. As in all series, artists will receive 50% of the net proceeds of print sales.
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*Unframed prints ship within 1-3 weeks.
*Framed prints ship within 3-6 weeks.
