Ana Maria Postigo

Madrid-based Andalusian artist Ana Maria Postigo works at the border between two and three dimensional art, where painting and sculpture overlap. Postigo molds three dimensional forms then paints them, recontextualizing abstract expressionism’s boldly applied paint swaths. This blending of media and methods attests to her formal training in decorative arts and furniture restoration. Similarly, her use of colors is both sculptural and painterly. Pools of bright tones swirl and drip from low-relief ruptures in some works; giant streams of paint pour down other canvas’s surfaces; elsewhere paints flow over one another, fissuring like tectonic plates.

By rupturing her works’ surfaces, Postigo dramatizes two artistic styles colliding. On one hand, her planes of stark white or warm earth tones evoke Kazimir Malevich’s abstracted geometrics. Meanwhile, bursts of color disturbing these surfaces evoke the generous paint application of abstract expressionists like Jean-Paul Riopelle. Postigo’s work, then, articulates a tension between the absolute reason of starkly abstracted canvases, and the repressed energies roiling below their surfaces.