BIO

BIO

Kate Araoz (B.1993, La Paz, Bolivia) works primarily with painting and drawing. Her practice investigates how the landscape is imbued with ideas of power rooted in Western systems of thought, such as colonialism, property, cartography, and classification. These systems shape the ways territory is represented, understood, and controlled, and continue to influence our perception of the world today.

The mountain and the tree, conceived as living beings, are the two central elements of her work. Her research unfolds as a journey into the vegetal and the organic. Rather than creating fixed landscapes, she evokes an imagined world through a visual poetics that takes shape in images, questioning whether territory can ever truly be possessed or fully understood.
She holds a degree in Sociology and Anthropology from the University of Rennes 2, France, and an MA in Fine Arts with a specialization in Contemporary Art from Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University. Her work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in Bolivia, Peru, and France.

CREATIVE METHODOLOGY

My paintings and drawings, on oil, acrylic or natural pigments, are mainly introspective self-portraits that I would like to see as an autobiographic poetry. Exploring natural elements that I encounter in my day to day environment. My research has two axes, the mountains of my hometown in La Paz, Bolivia, and a tree I found in my current life in Paris, France, with which I weave a relationship. I paint from real encounters with these natural elements, or from photographs of these elements taken by close friends.Through my paintings I try to display into images the poetry of the life of the tree with which I weave this relationship and how my life is linked to the tree. The notion of intimacy is very important in my paintings.

I look to translate this link that unites me to the tree and the mountains and materialize the sensations of this relationships that I’m building. These ideas are often displayed in compositions that reach the edges of my paintings. Depicted in large formats, I’m trying to express things that written or spoken language won’t allow me to say. I’m looking for a symbolic, almost spiritual dimension of painting, like religious icons of mountains and trees.