about

Mariángeles Soto-Díaz's work engages the legacies of modernism and their utopian ruins in a critique of abstraction's self-referential position. A native of the oil-producing country of Venezuela, Soto-Díaz subsumes the modernist promise and reinscribes its formal referents with a new set of meanings. From her aromatic "kitchen paintings" made with spices to her chocolate-inspired pieces, critics have written that her work possesses "an unusual intimacy that refuses to be interpreted by banal codes," and that it "vindicates painting" in a "promising synthesis of North American and Latin American geometric abstraction."

Soto-Díaz calls geometric abstraction her first language, perhaps because she was raised by architects and spent countless hours on the main campus of the Central University of Venezuela, a World Heritage Site emblematic of modern city planning, architecture and art. Equally formative were early experiences of work by conceptual artists and her later graduate studies with Karl Benjamin. She holds an MFA from Claremont Graduate University and an MA from CalArts.

She lives and works in Southern California, but this year she is enjoying the Midwest as a Grant Wood Fellow at the University of Iowa.