Gabriela Garza Padilla

Gabriela Garza Padilla was born in Monterrey, Mexico in 1965. She started her working life in the communications business, reaching the corporate level, before establishing her own studio in 1990. Inspired by a reproduction print of Francesco Hayes' "The Kiss" whilst staying with her maternal grandparents in Mexico City - "that an artist could paint something so lifelike, so 'photographic'" she embarked on a spiritual journey that has taken her from the abstract, to the surreal, to the "magic realism" that defines her work today.

Gabriela is a self-taught artist who speaks the language of magic realism by using archetypes of humanity in a world of the fantastic, whose axis is the human being surrounded by dreams, hopes and fears. In the mid-nineteen ninety's, she experienced what she refers to as her 'Black Epoch." Dark colors - grays and browns - dominating her canvasses, denoting the cruelty and pain that she feels exists in the world. Today the colors are brighter, more optimistic - combining fanciful imagery with subtle wit, whilst drawing on heavy symbolism and personal experience - her style could be said to be "illusional realism."

At the forefront of Latin American surrealism where fantasy coexists with reality, Garza Padilla has had more than 40 individual and collective shows. As a result her paintings having been exhibited in Mexico, Europe and Japan, as well as the United States, and are to be found in private collections across the world.