Maria Carbonero

MARÍA CARBONERO (Palma de Mallorca, 1956).
"Face".
Mixed media on paper.
Signed in the lower margin.
Measurements: 19 x 28 cm.

Maria Carbonero studied Fine Arts at the University of Barcelona, where she graduated in 1981. She made her individual debut the following year, in an exhibition dedicated to her work at the Joaquín Mir gallery in Palma. Since then he has continued to hold personal exhibitions both in his hometown, mainly in the Pelaires gallery, and in Madrid (Juana Mordó galleries, 1985 and 1988; and Pilar Parra, 1997), Barcelona (Gaspar gallery, 1987; Palau de la Virreina, 1998), Seville (Félix Gómez gallery, 1993) and Santillana del Mar (Casas del Águila and de la Parra, 1996). He has also had solo exhibitions abroad, in the Parisian galleries Etienne de Causana (1985) and Kopylov (1989), the Dusseldorf Forum (1990) and the Appiani Arte Trentadue in Milan (1995). He has also participated in important group exhibitions and fairs in Spain as well as in Frankfurt, Rostock and Bremen in Germany, Paris, Tokyo and Holte (Denmark). This year, 2010, she debuts as "Artist of the Year" with an exhibition of her pictorial career at the Museum of Menorca. María Carbonero paints mainly faces, conceived as moral landscapes. The painter has been progressively eliminating the superfluous, staying in the representation of the essential, in a sort of universal metaphor about the face. In her beginnings, in the eighties, the painter treats the human figure in a primitive way, in a context that recreates the bullfighting world. Little by little, women will become the undisputed protagonist of her work, and at the end of the decade, color takes a leading role in the faces painted by the Mallorcan. In the nineties, women become masculinized, and black and white dethrone the bright colors. But it will be her trip to Africa that will mark this painter; since then she starts a new cycle, marked by more accentuated factions and faces painted with ethnic motifs.