SAELIA APARICIO
Resume
Valladolid, España (1982)
She is a London-based Spanish artist who completed her MA in Sculpture at the Royal College of Art in 2015. Her multidisciplinary work dwells on ideas of the organic, establishing analogies between corporeal and social mechanisms. The body is a malleable source of wonder and horror for Aparicio in her practice that spans large-scale mural drawings and sculptures that often feature modified found objects and mouth-blown glass. Humour and anaesthetic style inspired by comic books and cartoons belies a concern for the bodily impact of daily life, the environment, disease, and age.
The language Aparicio creates inhabits an interstitial space in which a plant can caress a foundation, in which an empty house can feel the warmth of the people that it is no longer housing. In her work, what is terrifying is revealed with a sense of humour, in this way destabilising our perception and inviting us to take a journey where other rules apply. A journey in which we can be plants or concrete, spores or microplastics, a journey in which we have to let ourselves go.
-
Saelia Aparicio operates within the paradoxical spaces that we can find in what we consider the normal and the everyday, using a unique symbolic system to represent, but also to digest, a stark reality. The artist creates a speculative universe for the audience and invites them to imagine with her, creating an ecosystem of characters and situations that drives us, without guiding us, into this fascinating thing we call present. From invasive species, to housing problems, pollution or climate crisis, her work navigates within this convoluted momentum using whispers instead of statements, talking through the materials she uses, the objects she builds, the shapes she creates. This produces in the visitor the aim to imagine and think collectively about alternative futures.
-
Expositions
2026
A Joyful Parasite, The Southwark Park Gallery y Burton Bideford, Reino Unido
Tiempo de Barro, Somers Gallery / Salón ACME, CDMX
2025
A Joyful Parasite, The Baltic Newsgate, Newcastle
36ª Bienal de Ljubljana, Mestna Galerija, Eslovenia (cur. Chus Martínez)
Exposiciones en Londres, Berlín y Chicago (FUMI, Mariane Ibrahim, Kornfeld, entre otras)
2024
Exposiciones en Londres, Seúl, Estambul, Los Ángeles, Leeds y Mallorca
Destacan: Bold Tendencies, Kate MacGarry, Vitrine Gallery, Sarabande Foundation
2023
Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Madrid (cur. Chus Martínez)
Saatchi Gallery, Londres
Exposiciones en Madrid, Estambul y Milton Keynes
Colaboración con la marca Chopova Lowena
2022
Exposiciones en Goldsmiths CCA, Londres; Friedman Benda, Nueva York; MUSAC, León
Participación en Design Miami y ferias en Nueva York
Proyectos con FUMI Gallery
2021 – 2019
Participación en Liste Basel, Kunsthaus Hamburg, Serpentine Galleries, Casa Encendida, Madrid
Exposiciones en Londres, Roma, Hamburgo, Hong Kong y Ciudad de México
2018 – 2015
Exposiciones en Londres, París, Marsella, Barcelona y Liverpool
Participación en Bloomberg New Contemporaries (ICA Londres / Bienal de Liverpool)
Residencias, premios y apoyos (selección)
2023 – Nominación al Henry Moore Foundation Artist Award
2020 – Jerwood Survey 2; Paul Hamlyn Foundation COVID Grant
2019 – Generaciones, Fundación Montemadrid
2017 – Residencia en Sarabande Foundation (Lee Alexander McQueen)
2016 – Bloomberg New Contemporaries; RBS Bursary Award
2014 – Residencia Salzamt Atelierhaus, Austria