ARTIST-IN-RESIDENCE
SEPTEMBER - OCTOBER 2026
Juana Subercaseaux
Abstract Painter
From Chile, based in Mexico City
ARTIST STATEMENT
Juana Subercaseaux born in 1986, in Santiago de Chile. She lives and works in Ciudad de México. Subercaseaux holds a BFA from the PUC Chile (2009). She has exhibited at Colector Gallery, Houston USA (2025), TOKAS Tokio, Japan (2025), OMR Gallery, Mexico City (2024), MAPA, Argentina (2023), TIM Gallery, Chile (2018, 2022), 7th Athens Biennale, Greece (2021), OMA Gallery, Chile (2020, 2021), Tallinn Art Hall, Estonia (2020), Centro Cultural M100, Chile (2020), Centro Cultural Matta, Argentina (2019), House of Egorn, Germany (2019), E.A.B, Chile (2019) Barrios Bajos Gallery, Chile (2018), among others. Subercaseaux has held a residence at Casa Pequeña, Roatán, Honduras (2024) and S.A.S Residency at Arteles, Finland (2016). Grants include Fondart Chile (2020, 2021).
In my work, I seek to develop a visual identity through the exploration of the intangible aspects of nature. Through painting I investigate the evocative and subjective power of scientific phenomena such as transitions, chemical events, atomic fusions, forces, energies, and matter. My research focuses on representing an incorporeal dimension of nature. I question how organic, scientific events, microscopic or macroscopic, are expressed and how they intertwine with mysticism, the intimate and the spiritual. Lately, I've been focusing on electricity as a vital force and incorporeal form of communication that bridges living and inert, matter and cosmos. Is it matter endowed with spirit, the driving force behind life, an "anima mundi" weaving bodies, objects and information together?
Ideas from Buddhism and animism inform my work. I seek painting as testimony to an invisible relationship between being and nature, dissolving the illusion of dualism. In my work, natural entities are not passive but understood as "you" rather than "it", engaging the perceptual body continuously. Personally, painting is intimately related to spirituality. It is a vehicle that allows me to engage with the invisible, with what has no name, with mystery. Through the act of painting, I pose questions that I do not intend to answer, as a self-sufficient truth that does not require concepts or words to emerge.
Formally, I am interested in placing organic, chaotic, fluid, ambiguous, or transforming elements in tension with straight forms, grids, lines, and angles. The curved, the fluid, and the random function as representations of the organic and the living, while the straight or linear appears as artificial and constructed. In this sense, my work moves within liminal spaces between figuration and abstraction, and I like to play with the feedback between both languages, offering small cues that stimulate the viewer's subjectivity and imagination. As in the logic of a Rorschach test, I think that painting continues to change after it is finished, under the intimate and shifting gaze of the viewer and its context.