Pia Ortuño

Pía Ortuño (b. 1996 San José) is a Costa Rican artist currently living and working in London. Her practice is directed by her country's landscape and customs, from pre-Columbian spiritual rituals to post-colonial religious iconography. The separation from her homeland and the newfound life in her current environment creates a duality in her personal narrative that shows up in her work.

In an ensemble of painting, sculpture and installation, Ortuño examines the relationship between industrial materials and decomposing metals with natural pigments, traditional mark-making, and ritualistic gestures. Through chisel marks that disrupt the surface, forming planes upon which the viewer’s eye can discover light and colour, the artist creates a choreography that ultimately records time.

When writing about Pia's practice, the author Matthew Holman observes that "‘We love to contemplate blue’, wrote the poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, ‘not because it advances to us, but because it draws us after it’. Ortuño’s works operate on us in the same way. We are invited into the fractures and crevices of the surfaces, and as we get closer to them and begin to break apart the gridded logic of the modular structure in our mind, we get lost in our own imagined combinations. We realise that there is an underlying system here which we will never understand; we wait at the gate but cannot cross the threshold".