Diana Larrea

Diana Larrea - Mandalas about women's artists

Biografía del Artista:

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 plastic creators, I created this series of drawings constructed in the form of a mandala, inspired by the work of some of the great masters essential 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 taken from the artistic universe of these seven artists. I carried out a selection of symbols that appear recurrently in the artistic production of these artists and that are closely identified with their work. In this way, I intended to reconstruct a powerful frame of reference where to become aware of the influence exerted by the work of the great masters and reaffirm their mythification. 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 inherited culturally, but resides in our psyche in a biological way. For this reason, the mandala structure is a powerful representation that is repeated in different civilizations. We see it in megalithic circles, Mayan healing rituals, or the rose windows in the stained glass windows of Gothic cathedrals. We also find the mandala pattern in Nature: in the cellular structure with its central nucleus, the solar system, the design of our eye iris, spider webs or the crystals of ice molecules.