Cecilia Granara

Born 1991, lives and works in Mexico.

Cecilia Granara is a painter and a writer, drawing on self-fiction, poetry, and religious and symbolic iconography. She is interested in cultural attitudes to sexuality, bodies and the use of color as a vehicle for emotions. Her work questions representations of the feminine and explores the body as the seat of emotions. Love, desire, longing, or sadness are all states that the artist symbolizes in her paintings. Indeed, Cecilia Granara’s paintings create territories to welcome the expression of suffering and anger, to revive them and live through them in a meditative experience that summons communion and the collective. The power of immersion in colors sends us into a choreography of healthy energies. They awaken the body to make it enter into empathy with stories of imaginary suffering populated by apparitions, deities and ghosts. If the colors express appeasement, hope, warmth and joy, they also give us a collective refuge from violence, so we can evacuate it, using pleasure as a possible path of resistance.

Cecilia Granara studied at Central St. Martin’s School of Art and Design in London and Hunter College in New York City. She graduated from Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Her work has been included in institutional shows at Fondation Ricard, Paris ; MAXXI, Rome ; CAC Passerelle, Brest ; Château La Coste, Le Puy ; LAAC, Dunkerque ; Parc Saint Léger, Pougues les Eaux. Recent solos include “No love without grief” at Exo Exo, Paris ; "Naître, Renaître" at CAC Passerelle, Lesneven ; “Brittle Stars” at Sapling Gallery, London. She was a finalist in the Antoine Marin Prize in 2019 and has been nominated for the Cairo Prize in 2021. She is part of Trienale Milano in 2023.