On Wednesday July 23rd at 8 p.m., Art Zone 42 Gallery inaugurates the exhibition of the Mexican artist Blanka Amezkua titled “Figuras del Alma” (Figures of the Soul). Born in Mexico, the artist has been living and working in Athens for the last four years. In the new series of works she’s presenting, she skillfully combines contemporary art with tradition. In this project she collaborated with traditional artists and artisans from three different Mexican states (Guerrero, Oaxaca and Michoacán),which are known for their rich culture and history. By projecting as a model a distinctive form-figure of her body, the people with whom she collaborated, created works with traditional materials, which have been used from generation to generation, for centuries, as far as pre-Columbian period.

The artist mentions about her work: ‘Collaborating with these artisans reminded me of the importance of folk or traditional art, not only in Mexico but everywhere. These gestures that are shaped by the ancestral knowledge, still using materials and techniques that their parents, grandparents or great grandparents used, often times repeating the same imagery, or telling the same story, over and over again, as in an eternal chant; their trained skills and work ethic taught me that despite the given current maladies that abound in Mexico, and elsewhere in the world, these ancestral hands continue to create and exist, to remind us that another world is possible’.

Blanka Amezkua was born in Mexico and has lived many years in the United States. She was formally trained as a painter, studying in Florence, Italy and received her B.A. from California State University Fresno.  Her work and projects have been shown in Mexico, the United States, Belgium and Greece at MoMA-PS1, Exit Art, The Bronx Museum of the Arts, El Museo del Barrio, Queens Museum of Art, Towson University, among others. After a six month stay in Mexico in 2013 she worked closely with artisans in Mexico to create all of the work in the current show. Mentions of her work and projects are included in the New York Times, TimeOut, Daily News, Art21:blog, Queens Chronicle, International Museum of Women, WNYC, as well as other publications.  She lives and works between Cuernavaca (Mexico), Athens (Greece) and New York City.