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MARIANA SANCHEZ
Mariana Sanchez Hernandez is a Mexican-American multidisciplinary artist with a background in architecture and scenic design for the stage.
Mariana grew up in Mexico City, where she studied and worked as an architect for several years; in 2012 she studied for an MFA at the Yale School of Drama (now the David Geffen School of Drama), and since then, she has been designing sets for theatre, opera and ballet. In 2024, she earned an MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art in London. She is now based in New York, NY, and Mexico City.
Mariana’s paintings appear through a spontaneous and playful process that brings to life complex narratives. Using humour and within a feminist position, she explores the ambiguities, contradictions and absurdities of human experience.
Her marks and paint application on the canvas live in a flexible space between representation and abstraction and deal with the reference of the media itself. Domestic references, intimate self-reflections, the feminine and motherhood are subjects that appear constantly in her work.
In her more textural work, she has been exploring subjects of motherhood, gender, care, domesticity and a sense of otherness through the application of the medium. Complicating the traditional notion of oil on canvas as one of the classical highest regarded mediums in painting, the oil paint has been applied here through confectionary tools as a symbol of care and as a means to question women's work that throughout history has been considered "craft".
Mariana uses humour in her compositions, inspired by the birthday cake motifs of her childhood in Mexico, and with these elements, explores the intersection of overwhelm, maternal bliss, feminism and otherness.
