Elena Rato

ELENA RATO (Asturias, 1979).
"Urban archaeology. Piña colada found". 2019.
Acrylic painting on canvas and adhesive vinyl on lacquered MDF.
Certificate of authenticity attached.
Measurements: 110 x 150 cm.

Elena Rato is an artist with early professional recognition, a consequence of her tenacity and quality, an example of her great creative level and a risky and determined way of facing creation. Graduated in Fine Arts at the University of Salamanca, 2003 and Séneca Scholarship for academic exchange at the Polytechnic University of Valencia. Her career is marked by constant research, starting from a position close to abstract expressionism to a contained expressiveness. And perhaps this containment of the expressive jet has led her, in one of her main lines of action, to go beyond the limits of the canvas. She explores the physical relationship between the pictorial support, the canvas, and the space that frames it, reflecting on the physical presence of painting from an expanded conception of itself. He uses a very defined chromatic palette where pink and yellow are the protagonists and are interspersed with the so-called tangles, black spots computerized by vector drawing, which began to emerge in 2005 and since then have remained as an iconographic paradigm of his abstraction. In 2014 she exhibits individually the project "Entanglement" at The Americas Collection gallery in Miami, as well as "Soft shot" at the Barjola Museum, a national project framed in the Miradas de Mujeres Festival. In early 2020 she strengthens her career with a solo exhibition at Furiosa Gallery in Madrid with great critical and public repercussion. She participates regularly in national and international fairs with the galleries that represent her. Between 2023 and 2024 she has solo exhibitions "Quebrar la pintura" curated by Santiago Martinez and "Transitar un Rato", curated by María Von Touceda, closing this stage with her first retrospective exhibition "La imperfección como camino" within the project "Contra el Canon" with the Feminist Association of Asturias "Clara Campoamor" and the Vice Chancellor of the University of Oviedo. She has won awards such as the XLII National Art Contest of Luarca, National Contest of Contemporary Painting "Casimiro Baragaña" or the Young Art Contest Pancho Cossío. He has been a finalist in the International Prize of Plastic Arts Guasch Coranty, in the prestigious Valdepeñas, in the Biennial of Plastic Arts "City of Pamplona" or in the Encounters of Contemporary Art EAC, among others. He has participated in group shows such as Celebrating Art Basel with Tiffany, Miami; Nuevos itinerarios at Casa de la Obra Pía, Havana, the Openart art meetings at the Centro de Historia de Zaragoza or Expresión contemporánea asturiana in Mexico City. His works are in different public and private collections such as the Museo de BBAA de Asturias, the Ortiz-Gurdian Foundation in Nicaragua, Dacach-de Castro in Miami as well as the Museo Nacional de Danza in Cuba, the Government of Cantabria, the Consejería de Cultura del Principado de Asturias or the Alimerka and DíazCaneja Foundations in Spain.