Donna Huanca — Born 1980, Chicago, Illinois. Lives and works in Berlin, Germany. Represented by Peres Projects, Berlin; and Travesia Cuatro, Madrid/Guadalajara/Mexico City.

 

Donna Huanca grew up in Chicago as daughter of Bolivian parents whose native country and cultural traditions are a recurring inspiration to her practice. Her work evolves across painting, sculpture, performance, choreography, video and sound, crafting a unique visual language based in collaboration and innovation. At the very heart of her oeuvre is an exploration of the human body and its relationship to space and identity. Her live sculptural pieces, or in the artist’s words, ‘original paintings’, work primarily with the nude female body, drawing particular attention to the skin as a complex surface via which we experience the world around us. Largely collaborative, the partnership between artist and model is imperative to Huanca’s practice. 

 

By exposing the naked body, while at the same time concealing it beneath layers of paint, cosmetics and latex, Huanca and her performers urge the viewer to confront their own instinctive response to the human form, which, in the artist’s hands, is both familiar and distorted, decorative and abstract.

 

Huanca graduated from the University of Houston, Texas, the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Maine, and Städelschule, Hochschule für Bildende Künste, Frankfurt. Recent solo exhibitions include: OBSIDIAN LADDER, Marciano Art Foundation, Los Angeles; LENGUA LLORONA, Copenhagen Contemporary; PIEDRA QUEMADA, Belvedere Museum, Vienna; Cell Echo, Yuz Museum, Shanghai; Lengua De Bartolina Sisa, Travesía Cuatro, Madrid; and Scar Cymbals, Zabludowicz Collection, London.