My work focuses on challenging our physical laws and altering our sense of logic, in bending and transforming materials to create the impression that the works are not man-made. I create sinuous, contorting steel forms that outline spaces in an organic way; forms that can be easily tied together amalgamate with architecture and seem, at times, to be levitating.

Metal allows me to create an overriding paradox between matter and form: to create sinuous forms that are full of life and movement, in clear contrast to the rigidity and structure of the material -steel- I use to make them.

Knots are one of the abstract forms I use, and their multiple symbolisms increase the scope and resonance of my work. Knots imply human activity and they have different connotations in terms of how they are used; connotations that could even be contradictory and/or ambivalent. Man makes knots to solve countless functional situations: they are a metaphor for life.

My artistic training began at the Drawing and Painting Academy Tárrega in Barcelona, Spain, where I studied for a year and a half, starting at the age of 15. Following that, I enrolled in the School of Applied Arts and Artistic Crafts La Llotja in Barcelona, where I graduated after six years, specializing in Mural Painting and Pictorial Techniques. I also spent two additional years studying Fashion Design at the same school.

I have never really considered myself an artist, nor do I know if I am one. I simply dedicate myself to painting and leave it to others to decide what art is and who qualifies as an artist. My mother used to paint when she was young, and I often watched her, which inspired me to make my first brushstrokes on one of her paintings. From a young age, I felt drawn to painting.

Regarding my pictorial style, some art critics have described my work as belonging to Magical Realism or Pop Art. My friend, the renowned psychologist Antonio Bolinches, refers to me as a master of psychological painting.

While I don’t like to define my style, I can acknowledge the influence of certain painters I admire, such as Salvador Dalí, Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, Diego Velázquez, Miquel Barceló, and Antonio López. The teachers I had during my studies likely influenced me as well, though I prefer not to describe my style myself and let others do so instead.

In my creative process, I don’t focus on any specific theme. I am drawn to anything that conveys beauty and speaks to me, whether it evokes memories, sensations, feelings, or concerns. I typically work with oil on canvas, though I also use other techniques when I feel they are appropriate. Over time, I have explored other media and disciplines, including sculpture, installations, set decorations, and painting magic boxes.

Currently, and in the future, I plan to continue painting what I want to paint, always seeking good themes and ideas and striving to capture them as best as I can. My goal is to keep improving.

I consider all the exhibitions I have participated in to be important. My work has been featured in several museums, including the Museum of the International Olympic Committee in Lausanne; Switzerland; in Melilla, Ciudad Real, Albacete, Barcelona (Spain); and the José Martí Museum in Havana, Cuba. My works are also part of private collections belonging to figures such as the late Margaret Thatcher, Fidel Castro, and currently FC Barcelona. All awards I have received are equally meaningful to me.

Capturing the essence of being female through a prism of intrigue, humor, and absurdity, I offer a fresh perspective on the narratives that shape women’s lives. I believe that we have been fractured throughout eras in media and art history, an oversimplification of women that is mere misrepresentation.

I navigate the illusion between past and present, creating a contemporary chronicle of life interwoven with memories of joy, sorrow, growth, and introspection. These emotions need not be simplified, they occur as simultaneous phenomena in individuals’ lives.

Themes of identity, feminine roles, child rearing, and aging are used as threads in the tapestry of my own experiences. My feminine-based approach to viewing and describing the world extends beyond drawing and painting to include sculpture, installation, performance, and film.

Drawing and painting are intentionally calculated, while my sculptures and installations are freely associative with what it means to be feminine. Performance and film poetically capture collective female consciousness, recording the stories of myself and women in my community.

My experimental approach to layering materials and objects draws viewers into deliberate dialogues to probe questions about female roles and experiences.

In my world, I transform the mundane into the extraordinary, infusing the every day with unexpected twists. My multidisciplinary approach enables me to consider the relationship of material, process, and outcome.

My selection of mediums and methods, both used independently and combined, translate into questions and reflections on the diverse facets of being female in a world that is nuanced with challenges. In this large body of work, I address the need for society to honor women fiercely for their many roles.

From May 10 through October 27, 2024, I present my largest museum solo to date at Burchfield Penney Art Center, SUNY Buffalo State University.

Working across a broad range of mediums and materials, my rhythmic compositions are composed of colored figurative abstract forms. I work in charcoal, oil and acrylic on paper, canvas, and clay, focusing on figural abstraction. Movement is both part of my process and product. The female remains the focus. She is a vessel, a vehicle, and reflection of our times. Improvisation, intuition, and impulse is essential to my process.

Recurring themes include beauty, the female figure, movement, dance, environment, and purpose. I am inspired by moments from my own life and elements from historical paintings that resonate with society’s current and future timelines. I use rhythm as a visual language and my movements are mirrored in the work’s gestural qualities beyond the borders of the canvas.

The folding process is something I have explored with numerous materials. Just as we can reinvent ourselves, I mend, repair, and reconstruct compositions by folding, unfolding, and refolding the subject’s form, taking on new material presence. When turned, the figures suggest different emotional stories, and offer a 3-dimensional perspective of negative space. The process entails revealing, both literally and figuratively. I work often in repetition and sequence to create a rhythm, and visual metaphor. Each new iteration supports an over-arching movement while focusing on transition and transformation, chance, and process.

Gia Tabares is a recent graduate of West Broward High School, where she excelled with honors in the Dual Enrollment program, which had her enrolled in classes at Broward College. Her interest in photography has proven her talent as well, and aspires to study Communications next fall.

Her Belizean mother and Cuban father give her a universal perspective that is reflected in her relations with our esteemed artists and she shines at her meticulous stewardship of works that enter and exit OMSA Gallery, with the utmost care.

Daniella Sforza began her career in the arts after graduating from New York University and was hired on as a production assistant to the illustrious Jury of the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. After her marriage she returned to her birthplace of Argentina to raise her family of three girls just as democracy was returning to that country after a long military dictatorship.

During those hard economic times, Daniella worked at the Buenos Aires Herald as their art and photography critic. And while she raised her girls she worked independently for many organizations including CNN Travel Now, Oxford University Press and published the cultural chapter on Buenos Aires, for the first and second editions of Random House Fodor’s Gold Edition on Argentina. She has also published a tome on Thomas Hartmann,” Immediate Geographies” and a translation of the first Monograph edition on Guillermo Kuitca for the ICI in Argentina.

Upon her return to Miami she found herself heading up new media productions for Discovery Communications before returning to her calling in the art world. Daniella spearheaded the direction of two of the largest start-up galleries in the Wynwood District during its heyday and witnessed its rise and fall. She then returned to New York to work independently as a Marchand and happily is now back in Miami where she is proud to be a part of OMSA Gallery.

My paintings are the result of my continuous journey of self-discovery and realization. This journey travels through many roads with various experiences influencing me including my culture, nationality, race, spirituality, and psyche.

It is a dualistic endeavor searching as much within as well as understanding what is reflected outside of myself. What are my origins; where do I come from; and what is my purpose? These are among the questions I encounter on my path.

I paint images conveying energy, movement, and fluidity. The work is a contemporary approach to making automatic surrealist expressions that provoke subconscious thought from the mind.

The paintings provide the viewer with a meditative platform, which conjures up subconscious thoughts hidden deep within the psyche. It represents the artist as a modern-day shaman of society. The present and the primitive collide to form a sensual dance of humanity being born from chaos.

For over 40 years my work has been a mix of abstract and figurative painting. Always in search of the emotional connotations that can be evoked in abstraction as well as the overall frustration of social and political issues that I witness here in Puerto Rico. Usually executed in series that focus on a particular theme or event that in some way has disrupted or caught my attention.

The work stems from earlier figurative paintings depicting an array of objects, toys, dolls, etc., found in old gumball machines and over the years evolved into visual lingo that creates extremely busy canvases and assemblages full of color and strong graphic marks.

A reflection of my love of collecting which I jokingly call Organized Sophisticated Hoarding (OSH). I’ve since referred to these works as “The Accumulation Series.” Oftentimes using accurate visual starting points to create thematic series that share common denominators and have, in many instances, figurative suggestion. Physically the paintings are a layered, built up surface that leaves traces of process with evident corrections and adjustments that accumulate on the picture plane.

Recently I’ve started with a parallel series called “Mind Cleanse,” where a mix of my abstract markings are paired with identifiable elements telling a particular story or memory. The overall experience for the spectator is an interior view of myself, a revealing portrait of my own personality and dark humor. A spin on the common Self Portrait.

Over the years there have been major influences that have changed my thinking and creativity and which evolved into the painting idea that I continue to explore. My seeing and creating totally changed when I was introduced to The Color Experiments Program developed by Yale University Artist and Professor Josef Albers.

Color is elusive; it never stays the same. It interacts with what surrounds it and what is behind it. I use this concept in my work.

I mainly did landscapes early in my career. Later for several years, I disciplined myself to paint with only ultramarine blue, burnt sienna, naples yellow plus white. Seeing how many ways this palette could change was a major learning experience. Putting different mediums in the paint created areas of gloss and matte finishes. Not good for a colorist. I discovered a beeswax finish which solved the problem. This beeswax experience introduced me to adding it to my oils.

When I moved to Florida I had the opportunity to work with well known Op Artist Richard Anuszkiewicz. He advised me to let go of my northern thinking and just look and play. What struck me was the multitude of colors and the landscape. There is a horizon line where the land or sea meet the sky.

Here is the subject to float my idea of interaction of color using a limited palette. Another influence from my mentor Artist John Day came to mind. He cautioned me, “Don’t lose your strokes.” My paintings are a combination of using only three colors but choosing from a wide range of colors and applying with my energy different strokes from an horizon line either actual or inferred.

This is technically the process. The sum of these do not equal the whole. Some of the works speak to an experience or a painting idea I want to explore. They become more than paint on canvas. The work is never finished as there is always the next vision.

I use my own refuse, and the discards and remains of others, to address timely environmental issues. With a strong sense of place, the work examines our own suburban backyards, our ecosystems, South Florida, and our home – planet Earth. Heavily observational, and research based, my co-conspirators in artistic practice are often scientists, whose guidance in double checking accuracy of scientific fact and the literacy of my visuals allow me to give free reign to modes of visual communication such as surrealism, palimpsest-based collage, concrete poetry, or performative play.

This practice hones my own awareness of my responsibility as an environmental artist to take the words in Weintraub’s treaty, “What’s Next?” to heart and use the materials I already have including the random remains of deceased friends’ and relatives’ closets and studios, in a serious non-consumer exercise. I often fail, buying glue by the gallon, and discovering I can’t keep pace with the shelf life of some things I have accumulated. But the ideas, images, and materials create a dialogue in the studio where it ceases to be possible to determine which inspired or determined which. Do I make art faster, or curb my own supply of trash?

My work is heavily influenced by my own compulsions and aversions. Both of these opposing forces draw me in. By using media, accumulated, inherited or unwanted, to determine my art, I now find I use color where I did not, I use the language of surrealism which previously I looked past. I rip and glue, to create elegance from mundane fragments. I cannibalize my own work, my notes, my sketches, my ephemera, rejecting preciousness and reducing my footprint. All this to evoke discourse, create narratives, and to concretize the storytelling of life on earth, albeit dire and beautiful.

I use refuse, discards, and remains, to address timely environmental issues. The work examines suburban backyards, ecosystems, South Florida, and Earth. Heavily observational and research based, my co-conspirators in artistic practice are scientists, whose guidance in double-checking accuracy of scientific fact, and the literacy of my visuals, gives me free reign to modes of visual communication such as surrealism, palimpsest-based collage, concrete poetry, or performative play.

This practice hones my awareness of my responsibility as an environmental artist. I take Weintraub’s treatise, “What’s Next?” to heart and use the materials I have, including remnants from the closets and studios of deceased friends and relatives. It is a non-consumer exercise. I often fail, buying glue by the gallon, and discovering I can’t keep pace with the shelf life of things I have accumulated. These ideas, images, and materials, create a dialogue, becoming impossible to determine which inspired which.

My work is heavily influenced by my compulsions and aversions. These opposing forces draw me in. Through media, accumulated, inherited or unwanted, I use color where I did not, and the language of surrealism, which previously I looked past. All this evokes discourse, creates narrative, and concretizes the storytelling of life on earth.

My work celebrates brown women, exposing our vulnerabilities and power through portraiture. Before I ever had a studio practice, I began as a street artist, working with materials such as spray paint, charcoal and oil sticks, painting on walls and on scraps of cardboard and wood.

I continue to carry this spirit into my studio practice by continuing to explore and work with these materials. I also work in acrylic, mainly because I like to paint quickly, I want the work to dry quickly, I want the gesture that inspires me to remain fresh in the work.

My use of the biomorphic-shaped canvas implies a “less-than-perfect but beautiful” stance on how beauty is defined and derives from our connection to nature.

There is a sense of translucence in some of the paintings while others can feel quite dense. I love the use of dark undertones marked by a source of light penetrating the space, and am motivated to interject color and energy derived from my Afro-Caribbean background and visual culture into these areas of darkness.

The women I paint are ultimately reflections and fragments of me, creating connections to the untold stories of women from another time, of other women like me.

I grew up in Maracaibo, and attended a Catholic school and throughout my studies I spent my day drawing in school notebooks. Upon finishing high school, I wanted to go to Caracas to study fashion design, though my parents thought that not to be a strong enough formation, so I went to the university in my home town to study Business Administration.
I handed my diploma to my father and said I wanted to study fashion design and decided to go to IADE (Educational Institution for the Arts) for three years.

I returned to Venezuela and set up a children’s fashion wholesale business called Guts for five years until our country was overrun by Chavez and his people. I married and made the decision to migrate to the US, establishing ourselves for two years in Atlanta. When my 2-year old son started middle school we moved to Miami, and I found myself freed up to return to my childhood passion. It became my full-time instinctive joy, painting all day and night in my studio and gifting my work to family and friends.

People have received my work with the same joy in which I paint it. So much so that for the past eight years, my work has been my painting. It is my inspiration, and my full life has informed my work.

I am mostly influenced by impressionism, if I look to movements for inspiration, for the straightforward palette and brushwork that is evoked. I paint impressions of what I am seeing and identify with this approach in my paintings.

The Meninas by Velazquez also attracted me in this sense, as it broke schemes of portraiture and traditional representation. This painting became a strong narrative for me, not only for the women’s crinoline dresses but for the roles that are in that painting that make up the context of a woman’s life: of being a queen, a mother, a small girl, a princess, even a nanny and all the representation that arises from that. That painting seems infinite to me in its inspiration.

My style, in this sense, is figurative abstraction, where there is representation, but I am not limited to that and am free to abstract and express my vision, my impression of this world.

Subjectivity: Different Perspectives, Singular Vision
Isn’t subjectivity the same thing but viewed from different perspectives? When we talk about the boundaries of reality, I think it means closing our eyes, letting our imagination soar, and challenging the conventions that have been instilled in us. It’s about going a step further and surrendering to the journey. Expanding, generating, and crystallizing new realities is my mission. For an artist, the boundary between reality and fiction must be common ground, a comfortable space, a sort of headquarters from which to embark on each new adventure into unknown territories, with one foot inside and the other outside, where we can have a clear vision of what is unseen, only felt or intuited.

Delirium: Crossing Reality and Fiction
In my series Delirium, inspired by the dissonance of Napoleon Bonaparte’s reality, I explore the mental state of the portrayed subject through techniques like glitch and chromatic aberration, typically associated with video rather than painting. This approach aims to evoke a sense of discomfort in the viewer that is somehow pleasurable. The chosen chromaticism for these works balances the fidelity of the reference with the histrionics of contemporary painting, thus reinforcing the intention of unreality.

Havana: Beyond the Visible
This is not Reality. This is not what you think you see. This is not a matter of Life or Death. C’est, c’est ne pas une pipe. Magritte explained it well: this is not a pipe, but its representation. Similarly, this is not Havana either; it is its representation, completed by the viewer’s vision, each with their own experience and perception, and their own limits.
The experience of Havana differs greatly for someone who has wandered down Neptuno Street compared to someone who only knows Havana through stories and representations. From the same work, that reality can emerge or submerge, depending on the eyes observing it and how they live it.

The Artistic Journey
For me, art is about exploring these boundaries, creating spaces where reality and fiction blur and integrate. It’s about inviting viewers to question their perceptions and immerse themselves in the countless possibilities that lie just beyond the limits of the familiar. Through my work, I seek to offer a new lens to see the world, one that challenges, disorients, and ultimately enriches our understanding of reality.

My process starts with the observation of nature, and most of the time this happens when I take my boat out to go dive the reefs of South Florida. I’m interested in the natural mechanisms I see on display there and also the controlled random aesthetics of everything that is alive.

Form and function are other aspects that interest me when I document what I see underwater. Marine species that take over human debris and cohabitate is something that I use to create abstract narratives that symbolically emulate those phenomenons. These abstract narratives can be happy accidents or preconceived plans.

Sometimes I feel that the iconography I explore doesn’t belong to me as much as to a human subconscious visual inheritance, as if these shapes were embedded in our DNA, and I’m just tapping into that; interpreting it on canvas .

Sometimes I paint patterns made up of repetitive individual forms, sort of like how coral polyps make up colony structures. I noticed this parallel to my work, and that was a reminder that, whether conscious or not, nature guides my work and visual language.

I’ve developed these various shape families throughout the years, as if they were separate species of a made up ecosystem.

The more I’ve learned and practiced the more complex and refined they’ve become, it often reminds me of the process of evolution in general. These are some of the phenomenons that interest me and that I often apply to the concepts of my paintings and sculptures.

I was born in the Peruvian Andes but grew up in Lima, a cold, gray and complicated city that forced me to escape with my imagination, adopting the light and bright colors of the Andes, where I traveled whenever I had a chance scaping the bustle of the city; light and colors that I also found here, in the Caribbean.

Since I was a child I have been attracted to light, clarity and clean, pure colors. My work is influenced by the many years of being a children’s book illustrator before leaving Perú, experience responsible for the playful aspect of my work.

Other interests, such as erotism, sexuality, spirituality, and the eternal duality that governs the universe are also part of my work. My work is about the joy of life, about light and color. Through the years I earned many awards in Drawing, Watercolor, Graphic Design, Etching and Painting.

I was born in post-revolutionary Cuba in 1987 and educated in an academic setting heavily governed by the Russian Academy. This frame of reference is evident in all my work. To deny my experiences, perceptions, and the impact of history would be disregarding my own existence. These influences are the lens through which I create and the motivation that propels me.

Cuban history has guided me in a variety of ways. On the one hand, it allows me to rethink the way storytelling is part of memories. On the other, it allows me to question the accuracy of history and its recounting. This conflict absorbed me during my early years and continues to engage me as I complete
my artistic education.

Currently, this near-obsession with the past translates into figures, scenarios, and most importantly, the recreation of my own stories.

In Cuba, I was exposed to figurative arts by the presence of the Russian Academy. This presence, as well as the censorship of contemporary art and the limited access to information, was the accepted dogma.

Consequently, I understood that decontextualizing epochs and artistic symbols was the tool I could use to establish a connection between the present and the past. The resulting work provides an escape from reality and creates an illusory world. I am more fascinated by altering history than depicting it accurately.