Emilia Barrientos

Emilia Barrientos was born on July 2, 1985 in San Juan, Puerto Rico to a Puerto Rican mother and Guatemalan father. As a child she showed special talent and sensitivity for visual arts. At age 13 she entered the Fashion Design Academy of designer Lisa Thon. With her outstanding talent, she won the New Millennium Designers contest in 2000 when she was only 15 years old. After completing her high school, she entered the School of Fine Arts of the University of Puerto Rico where she completed a Bachelor of Arts in Painting, graduating in 2008. From that moment her career in the world of art and especially painting has been very productive and of intense experimentation. She has worked from the material art the composition and visual effects of the combined resins and in conjunction with textures marked by sinuous plaster, where the colors vibrate with each other at the rhythm of their own consistencies, with particular determination. Moving from white and transparent resins to black as synthesis, metaphor and sustenance of a very own plastic imaginary, Emilia has managed to consolidate a unique aesthetic proposal full of experimentation and plastic lyricism. As the artist tells us: “Black is a metaphor for my worlds and what is in it. It is an interpretive synthesis that disidentifies and at the same time expresses the construction of an imaginary that can be subverted and manipulated through material art. In each of my works you can see that set of small worlds that hit the imagination, challenge it and produce at the same time chaotic synthesis loaded with textures, colors and volumes.”

With her intense work Emilia has participated in various spaces dedicated to art on the Island. Her first individual exhibitions such as those of the Guatibirí Gallery and that of San Juan Bautista were the announcement of a career full of work and recognition in the world of Puerto Rican art. Her works are part of collectors, galleries, museums and institutions dedicated to education and culture. With over six individual exhibitions and more than a score of collectives, Emilia's work continues to surprise with her own and rich style.