A World of Magical Symbolism

As a young art student in Mendoza, in the foothills of the Andes in Argentina, Carmen Gracia originally studied painting and sculpture at Mendoza College of Fine Art. At twenty-five she felt the lure of Europe as the centre of avant garde art and left for Paris where she studied with the internationally renowned printmaker S.W. Hayter and started a new line of work with Atelier 17. She cultivated Hayter's technical methods of soft ground textures contrasted by deep etching printed in one colour, then overlaid by relief printing in another, and his creation of new shapes by stencils. Carmen Gracia then moved to London, where she joined the Slade School of Art in 1965. Carmen also lived in Lisbon and Oslo, finally settling in England in 1969.

In her artworks, Carmen Gracia gives life to a world of symbols evoking magical qualities, often creating dream like realities. Exaggerations of scale are used as an expressive dislocation of appearences to give fresh meaning and emphasis to familiar objects. Her enchantingly direct imagery has certain disconcertingly surrealistic characteristics, especially in her unexpected juxtapositioning, where an eye or a star can be in conjunction with a fish or an elephant to jolt the viewer into a new and apparently illogical universe.

Carmen Gracia works have been acquired by museums, major collections, and exhibited in solo and group exhibitions across the world including Argentina, Brazil, Australia, Canada, Finland, France, UK, Portugal, Germany, Japan, USA and Sweden.