Sandra Pani (born December 18, 1964 [1] in Mexico City) is a Mexican artist.
She showed an interest for painting and music since she was very young, beginning piano lessons when she was 9 years old. During her childhood and adolescence she studied with several teachers such as Silvia H. Gonzalez, Teresa Cito, Perla Krauze and Eugenia Marcos. Later, she was accepted to the National Conservatory of Music but only studied for one year from 1981 to 1982. In 1987, she entered the SACI Studio Art Centers International in Florence, Italy, and then studied at the Chelsea School of Art in London in 1988. On her return to Mexico, she entered National School of Fine Arts froM 1989 to 1992, attending the gravure workshop given by Jesús Martinez and Maria Eugenia Figueroa. While in school, she had her first solo exhibition in 1988 in Lourdes Chumacero Gallery in Mexico City. Her work was chosen to participate in student competitions, such as at the Royal "ACADEMY Summer Exhibition" and "Open Print Show" at the Bankside Gallery in London in 1989. In 1990 she received the Third Acquisition Sample Miniature Stamp Award, Stamp Museum Purchase Award and the Hall of Engraving Salon de la Plastica Mexicana, in Mexico City. In 1992, she received an honorable mention at the Diego Rivera Biennial of Prints and Drawings in Guanajuato, Mexico. In 1996, she was invited to participate at the Salon Bancomer II in Mexico City. [2]
In 1991 and 1998, she received the Grant for Young Artists of the National Fund for Culture and the Arts (FONCA) Mexico City. And in 2007 and 2011, she was made a member of the National System of Creators, the National Fund for Culture and the Arts (FONCA) Mexico City. Her work was selected for the Fifth Bienal Monterrey FEMSA in 2001, as well as for Yucatán Biennial at the MACAY Museum in Mérida, in 2004. She has had twenty solo exhibitions including: "If tree" at the University of Guanajuato's Hermenegildo Bustos Gallery during the Festival Internacional Cervantino (2011), "Duality and transformation" at the Anahuacalli Museum (2009), "From trees and bodies" at the Indianilla Station Cultural Center in Colonia Doctores, Mexico City (2008), "Body recovered," at the Gene Byron Museum in Guanajuato, "Geography of the Body" at the Gene Byron Museum as part of the Festival Internacional Cervantino (2003), "Recent Drawings 1998-1999" at the MACAY Museum in Mérida (1999), "Optical Scalpel" at the Museo Diego Rivera in Guanajuato (1998); and "Survive" at the University Museum of Poplar in Mexico City (1993). [2]
Distinguished critics have written about her work, such as Salvador Elizondo, Miguel Ángel Muñoz, Santiago Espinosa de los Monteros, Alberto Blanco and Gonzalo Velez. According to Salvador Elizondo, art critic from Milenio newspaper, these paintings represent the point at which the movement and life balance are expressive forms and unique heritage. Sandra Pani's paintings exhibited in her exposition of 1994 (Gallery Lourdes Chumacero) presume that had surfaced since then in this artist boldly pursued the ideal of Leonardo and Dürer: "Penetrating geomentría mechanisms and in the body, but in a less categorical, freer, more lyrical." [3] She is an artist whose soul is for the moment obsessed with the body as a complex or synthesis of parts or figures that integrate pictorial poetics. They are so to speak, anatomical inventions, variations or fantasies. These paintings aspire to capture the essence of the human body, an essence that could only be formal; a yearning for the body to be soul and for the soul to be made visible by a sign. [4]
According to Miguel Ángel Muñoz art critic from El Financiero newspaper, Sandra Pani belongs to a generation of artists that has considered painting as something exhausted, old fashioned and, to a certain extent, dead. It is certainly significant that Pani´s abstract, semi-figurative and almost classical approach to painting should have arisen at the peak of the conceptual and minimalist movements. Still, it might be argued that its conviction springs precisely from those apparently inauspicious beginnings. Pani´s works can be said to be figurative with certain poetical abstract accents. They are rooted in 20th-century painters such as Picasso, Morandi, Matisse and Giacometti, and in some modernist artists, especially North American abstract painters. [5] In the La Jornada newspaper, Muñoz states that Sandra Pani's drawings at the Festival Internacional Cervantino on its 39th edition in 2011 were in effect a decantation, which runs and drips as something that falls within a long time to stay only with the essence. An almost nothing, which is the record of almost everything. An atmosphere. A sign. [6]
Santiago Espinosa de los Monteros from Casa Lamm Gallery, says that using only a few lines she describes moments in an almost Oriental style, drawing simple and almost rudimentary sketches over her two-dimensional medium in a way that bares the work - unbridling it from anything that might stop it from achieving total expression. Her work is free from the narrative temptation, which often prevents us from grasping a missing story that becomes manifest by its very absence. In her work a pendular movement can be perceived that comes and goes from abstraction to figuration, as if from one extreme to the other. It briefly stops at both ends, but does not stay at either. The work is at the road thus treaded -in a two-way fashion- by two paths that cross each other constantly and go from figure to non-figure. Between them lies emptiness transformed into an expressive possibility -having become a body, as it were- making evident something that has never been there. [7]
Alberto Blanco of the journal Artes de México describes her works as "painted bodies, showing all their anatomical structures, their stroke, spot, and touch of color write her story, It is precisely in the surface of Sandra Pani´s paintings that the entrails of the represented body are surprisingly turned into trees and flowers, thanks to the transforming power of the poetic logic. Sandra Pani´s paintings are blood that is music that is wind dreaming in the branches of the tree that is also our body." [8]
Gonzalo Vélez, also an art critic said that Sandra Pani turned her attention to the drawing, figurative structure of all plastic core. And from there, her deep study, thoughtful search of her essence, her work became a path, tracking the trace of a line in the ambiguous boundaries between drawing and painting, painting sometimes with pencil drawing and with a brush sometimes. And the route was the body. [9] In the paintings of Sandra Pani, bodies explode and branch themselves because they accept precisely the virulent and cruel action which involves any alteration. The meaning of the metamorphosis can be seen in her work. Sandra Pani explores the liminal membrane of a series of processes that continuously generate abstract coordinated exchanges and outline for new corporeality. It remains to solve the mystery of the vacuum surrounding these vibrant apparitions. Sandra Pani shows how to embrace being and nothingness, recognized and exchanged from the heart of emptiness. [10]
Wikimedia Commons has media related to Sandra Pani . |
Guanajuato is a city and municipal seat of the municipality of Guanajuato in central Mexico and the capital of the state of the same name. It is part of the macroregion of the Bajío. It is in a narrow valley, which makes its streets narrow and winding. Most are alleys that cars cannot pass through, and some are long sets of stairs up the mountainsides. Many of the city's thoroughfares are partially or fully underground. The historic center has numerous small plazas and colonial-era mansions, churches, and civil constructions built using pink or green sandstone. The city historic center and the adjacent mines were proclaimed a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 1988.
Olga Costa was a painter and cultural promoter who immigrated to Mexico from Germany when she was twelve. She began to study art at the Academy of San Carlos but left after only three months to help support her family. However, she met her husband, artist José Chávez Morado during this time. Her marriage to him involved her in Mexico's cultural and intellectual scene and she began to develop her ability to paint on her own, with encouragement from her husband. She had numerous exhibitions of her work in Mexico, with her work also sent to be sold in the United States. She was also involved in the founding and development of various galleries, cultural societies and three museums in the state of Guanajuato. She received the Premio Nacional de Ciencias y Artes among others for her work.
The Festival Internacional Cervantino (FIC), popularly known as El Cervantino, is a festival which takes place each fall in the city of Guanajuato, located in central Mexico.
José Chávez Morado was a Mexican artist who was associated with the Mexican muralism movement of the 20th century. His generation followed that of Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros. Although Chávez Morado took classes in California and Mexico, he is considered to be mostly self-taught. He experimented with various materials, and was an early user of Italian mosaic in monumental works. His major works include murals at the Ciudad Universitaria, Secretaría de Comunicaciones y Transportes and Museo Nacional de Antropología in Mexico City as well as frescos at the Alhóndiga de Granaditas, which took twelve years to paint. From the 1940s on, he also worked as a cultural promoter, establishing a number of cultural institutions especially in his home state of Guanajuato including the Museo de Arte Olga Costa - José Chávez Morado, named after himself and his wife, artist Olga Costa.
Armonicus Cuatro is a group of four vocalists from Mexico: Mario Iván Martínez, Lourdes Ambriz, Nurani Huet and Martín Luna which mostly specializes in European medieval, Renaissance and Baroque music. All four are established musicians in their own right, with Martínez also known as an actor in film and Mexican television. The group has performed widely in Mexico at music and cultural festivals such as the Festival Internacional Cervantino as well as in Europe.
Laleget Danza is an international dance company based in Mexico City which was founded by Diego Vázquez in 2005. It has performed in Spain, United Kingdom, Netherlands, Slovakia and Curaçao. It has appeared in various theaters and festivals in Mexico including the Festival Internacional Cervantino in 2008 and 2011.
Elena Makhnev is a young violinist from the state of Guanajuato, who has been described as a “virtuoso”.
Marcela Lobo Crenier, is a Mexican artist from Mexico City whose work is distinguished by the depiction of everyday objects in strong, bright colors, often using color schemes associated with Mexico. She began her career in 1986 in Cancun doing etching, but moved to Mexico City and into painting by 1991. Most of her work is acrylics on canvas but she is also noted for her work with painting ceramics with Uriarte Talavera. She has also done painting on wood, created ceramics, collages and even shoe decoration and has been exhibited both individually and collectively in Mexico, Europe and the United States.
Jazzamoart is a Mexican artist best known for his painting which is mostly connected to jazz music in some way. Born Francisco Javier Vázques Estupiñán in Irapuato, Guanajuato, his talent was recognized early and he took his professional name from his dual passions of jazz and art. He is best known as a painter with over 400 individual and collective exhibitions on several continents, but he has also done monumental sculpture, stage scenery and has collaborated with musicians. He lives in Mexico City.
María Luisa Reid is a Mexican artist from Zacatepec in the state of Morelos. She is a member of the Salón de la Plástica Mexicana.
Vladimir Cora is a Mexican painter and sculptor based in the state of Nayarit, whose work has been recognized by various awards and membership in the Salón de la Plástica Mexicana. He discovered art at age fifteen, after deciding that he could not be a musician. He received training in Tijuana and Mexico City, with his first success in the 1980s. His style has been described as neo-figurative, minimalist and coarse, and he creates his works in series usually related to the apostles, flowers, birds and women, especially those related to Nayarit. He has had over 150 individual exhibitions both in Mexico and abroad and continues to work from his home state.
Lucinda Urrusti is a Mexican artist, whose work has gained fame not only from the writing of art critics, but also by poets and writers from other fields, such as Carlos Fuentes. She was born to a Spanish family which came to Mexico in 1939 to escape the Spanish Civil War and has remained in Mexico since. Urrustia is a part of Mexico’s Generación de la Ruptura, a group of artists that broke with the dominant Mexican muralism of the first half of the 20th century with most of her work classed as Impressionism and/or abstract. However, she is also a noted portrait artist, having depicted a number of Mexico’s elite in the arts and sciences.
Vicente Gandía was a Mexican artist of Spanish origin who is best known for his depictions of nature and buildings. He originally trained to be an architect but abandoned this in favor of art, but with his art career beginning by drawing interiors. His major break came in 1968, with international expose which led to greater demand for his work. Recognitions for his art include membership in the Salón de la Plástica Mexicana, two awards from the same institution, a homage to the artist sponsored by the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia while still alive and two others after his death, one with the Festival Internacional Cervantino.
Paulina Lavista is a Mexican photographer, noted for her controversial work which has tested the limits of the field. She is the daughter of a composer and a painter, beginning a career in modeling and cinema before moving into photographic work in the 1960s. She began with portrait work, with one of her first clients being longtime partner Salvador Elizondo, and later breaking into more artistic work with a series of nudes for the magazine Su Otro Yo. She has photographed many subjects from the Mexican art scene as well as images of people in every day activity, mostly in Mexico. She is a member of the Salón de la Plástica Mexicana.
Aliria Morales is a Mexican artist, who works in various media, including the creation of artistic dresses. Her work has been recognized with membership in the Salón de la Plástica Mexicana and various awards.
Guillermina Dulché is a Mexican painter, whose work has been recognized with membership in the Salón de la Plástica Mexicana. Dulché was born in Silao, Guanajuato and spent most of her childhood there. She took her first drawing and painting classes there with a local teacher, but when she was thirteen, she went to Mexico City to study art more formally. She enrolled in the Academy of San Carlos and studied under José Chávez Morado, a friend of her family’s. At the same time she took classes at one of the Escuelas de Aire Libre and regular classes in middle and high school. The rest of her formal training, between 1958 and 1962 was under a number of teachers including Adolfo Mexiac, Antonio Ramírez, Luis Nishizawa, Santos Balmori, Gabriel Fernández Ledesma, Antonio Rodríguez Luna, Nicolás Moreno and others.
Hermenegildo Sosa is a Mexican painter and art professor who is best known for colorful depictions of Mexican rural landscapes, especially those of his home state of Tlaxcala. He was born there into a farming family, whose economic condition delayed his education as he had to work from a young age. In his teens he arrived to Mexico City to work as a domestic, but this allowed him to attend school, including painting classes. Eventually, he entered the Escuela Nacional de Pintura, Escultura y Grabado "La Esmeralda", where he eventually gained a career as a professor.
María Luisa Mendoza, also known as La China Mendoza, was a Mexican journalist, novelist and politician. She served as a federal delegate from the state of Guanajuato to the 53rd Mexican legislature.
Carmen Parra is a Mexican painter. Her work is inspired in the New Spain iconography art: angels, archangel, eagles, butterflies and flowers.
Lilly Marie Rodriguez, known by her artist name Isis Rodríguez, is an American contemporary painter who uses the cartoon as a conceptual tool to discuss issues that focuses on the empowerment and liberation of women. Combining classical realism with contemporary influences including tattoo art, graffiti, and especially cartoons, her works bridge traditional distinctions between high and low art, creating a hybrid style that expresses new possibilities for female identity and spirituality. Judy Chicago and Edward Lucie Smith highlight Rodriguez as one of the few female artists to ever discuss the sex industry in her work, and Sherri Cullison includes Rodriguez among the most noteworthy American women artists of the 20th century.