Alicia Paz


Alicia Paz is an artist based in London, working internationally. Born in Mexico City, Paz graduated from UC Berkeley, École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts of Paris, Goldsmiths College and Royal College of Art London.
Over several years, Alicia Paz has focused on the tension between artifice/ illusion and the veracity of actual processes involved in painting, exposing the duplicitous nature of representation. Through her work, she explores notions of hybridity, assemblage, and metamorphosis, focusing particularly on the female figure: the self is experienced and presented as multiple, fluid, paradoxical. Paz's paintings are as much portraits as they are landscapes, combining references that range from erudite painting or the history of the painted image, to citations of advertising images or comics. Inhabiting fantastical and exotic landscapes, Paz's feminine subjects become fused and combined with organic life. Strange and unsettling visions of tree-women and monster-women also represent the fusion of the subject with painting itself: she often depicts amphibian or plant-like figures “weeping” pigment, their limbs, hair, and various ornamental accoutrements mud-caked and dripping, as if extracted from a colourful, post-cognitive swamp.
In August 2017 Paz unveiled her first public sculpture commission at in Magdeburg, titled Insel der Puppen, in steel and enamel.
Paz is working on a large research and production project exploring the network of women that are playing an important role in her life, personally and professionally. Her project is supported by the Arts Council England. She developed her research it into three exhibition, each specifically adapted to the location and with new work for each show. The first installation was Río y Mar at the Beecroft Art Gallery in Southend-on-Sea, part of Estuary 2021, followed by River Makers at the Visual Arts Centre in North Lincolnshire, both in 2021, and finally Juntas at the in Paris in early 2022. In 2024, the curator Bénédicte Delay, presented a solo show of Paz' work under the title Explorations au féminin at the Château de Haroué in Eastern France, in collaboration with the Centre des monuments nationaux CMN.
Her solo show Odisea opened during the Semana de las Artes Monterrey at the Drexel Gallery in Mexico in January 2026. She presented works that "explore water and ceramic traditions from a hybrid and feminist perspective."

Selected works

  • Island of Dolls, 2017, large exterior sculpture in email, steel and concrete, a commission for the Kunstmuseum Kloster Unser Lieben Frauen in Magdeburg
  • L'effrontée, 2011, mixed media on paper, 74 × 56 cm
  • Trapèze, 2010, oil, acrylic, collage on canvas 200 × 160 cm
  • When the Machine Stops, 2006, oil, acrylic, collage on canvas, 130 × 97 cm
  • Ghosts, oil, acrylic on canvas, 200 × 160 cm, 1999
  • Colossus, 1995, acrylic on canvas, 150 × 120 cm

Exhibitions

Solo exhibitions (selection)

Group exhibitions (selection)

Awards, grants and residencies

Collections

Further links

  • Uwe Gellner, Annegret Laabs, Jeannette Louie. Alicia Paz - The Garden of Follies. Verlag für Moderne Kunst, Vienna, 2016.
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