María Yzaga

Lima, Peru, 1995

            The promising young Peruvian artist María Yzaga has been developing a body of work in which her multidisciplinary approach—ranging from drawing, painting, sculpture, and performance to installation—coexists with a thoughtful awareness of curatorial dynamics: the particular way in which artworks and the body occupy space and interact with the viewer. Initially trained at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, she completed her studies at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in the Netherlands in 2020, where she established ties with the local art scene and developed a practical sensitivity toward shaping creative processes and work methods crucial to her artistic development.

            The variety of formal solutions evident in her early trajectory consistently orbits around the question of the body. The body as a sensory organ, as a gestural expressive tool, as a political site of the feminine; the body projected and externalized across space, canvas, or the surrounding objects. Her exhibitions combine a somatic dimension—where the body is freed to its automatisms, shadows, leanings, and attractions—with a collagistic arrangement of objects and symbols that surround or summon it, through objets trouvés, sculptural pieces, torn images, stains, and text. In this way, her poetics playfully navigates the fluid relationship between subject and object, where bodies acquire the density and functionality of things—strange and external—while the everyday world becomes an agent capable of producing and revealing life and the hidden stories of its past, its users, and its viewers.

            Yzaga invites spectators into this game of charging scenes with life and narrative—without fully revealing the silences that surround and shape them. Her work has been exhibited in galleries in Lima, New York, and Amsterdam. She has also participated in international art fairs such as PARC Lima, ArteBA Buenos Aires, and Object Rotterdam.