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About Elizabeth Waltenburg

Elizabeth Waltenburg was bom in 1983 in Buenos Aires where she lives and works dividing herself between Latin America and Europe. With a degree in Art History at Sorbonne University in Paris after attending the Faculty of Fine Arts at the Escuela Nueva in Buenos Aires she worked with the atelier of Martin Riwnyj, Nicolas Botte, Mariano Vidal. She has participated in group and solo exhibitions in Paris, Buenos Airee, Costa Rica and Spain.

The female figure has always been associated with a shadowy dimension of the self and with mystery. In the Middle Ages and still during Renaissance times the emancipation of women corresponded to a sense of discomfort that attributed to each manifestation of independence a dissonant figurative aspect. Francisco Goya drew his "Caprices" at a time when reason had not yet awakened, monsters and servants were still around the comer and the inquisitors marked diversity as stigmata to be removed. Elizabeth Waltenburg enters the dimension ot fairy tales combining the faces of children and animals with a realism that, while eliciting tendemess, highlights the contradiction of cultural constructions. The viewer enters the haunted world of Christina painted by Andrew Wyeth and descends into an introspective dimension that stems from poetry and becomes part of a subjective expression. It is a thread that creates a thematic continuity in the subject of melancholy, starting from the sequence of poems from Antonin Artaud to Cesare Pavese passing perhaps through the bucolic mysticism of Femando Pessoa. As many heteronyms that divide the paper, the characters are universal icons despite their objective recognition and varying their facial features they still remain related to the representation of deep feelings, as if the same person could in tum transfomt to reflect the emotions. in these terms, the theme of loneliness and that of splitting are complementary due to a logic of representation in which uniqueness can easily be dismantled. The choice of colors marks the transience and the intensity of the moment and the very meaning of transformations exactly as it happened in the video "Heart-Shaped Box" signed by Anton Corbfin for the band Nirvana: sadness creeps into the heart and in the body like a cancer painting the clearest white in a range of colorful and luminous hues. ln a similar way, the light fills the entire surface of the canvas, radiating directly from the faces and making them look like spectra.