Lorena Espitia graduated from the Academia Superior de Artes de Bogotá in 2007. She completed a master's degree at the California Institute of the Arts in 2017, thanks to a Banco de la República de Colombia scholarship. She was a fellow at Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart (2017-2018) and participated in the FLORA ars+natura Foundation's Healing/Creating seminar in 2019.
Espitia maintains a constant dialogue with painting, questioning and expanding the definition of "painter" while exploring techniques, representational models, and expansive possibilities. His projects address specific circumstances using heterogeneous strategies, including the Russian avant-garde, Godard's cinema, and science fiction.
Her most recent work focuses on reflecting on forms of cultural consumption and their relationship to the history of art in this century. It explores spatialities within painting that reflect contemporary approaches where painting retakes leading positions.
In her own words:
"Although my work engages in a sustained dialogue with painting, it is a dialogue that fosters the tension to reconsider the varieties of what is called "painting" and to understand the scope and limitations of the social definition of the "painter." My projects often respond to specific circumstances that allow me to destabilize my position as an artist by exploring heterogeneous strategies of representation - those of advertising and graphic design, of the early Russian avant-garde and popularized paleontological knowledge, of Godard's early films and vernacular science fiction - and by investigating the possibilities of unfamiliar materials. My work is conceived as a means for learning, and the characteristics of each project are developed in light of an autodidactic impulse to address themes such as the iconography of extinction, the cognitive potentialities of diagrams, the visual representation of social struggles, or the connection between acts of vision and acts of movement..."
