Claire de Santa Coloma. Kiss
Claire de Santa Coloma (born 1983, Buenos Aires) studied ‘Direct Carving’ at the Ateliers Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris and Visual Arts Research at the Sorbonne. In 2017, she won the EDP Foundation’s New Artists Award. After spending many years in Paris, Madrid, Lisbon and Sydney, the artist has been living and working in Buenos Aires, Argentina, again since 2023.
Her hand-carved sculptures, made from found wood or wood given to her, explore central themes of sculpture as well as the creative means underlying it. She deliberately alludes to the vocabulary of 20th-century abstract sculpture – as a kind of archetype of the ‘sculpture’ genre.
As one wanders amongst the sculptures, which Santa Coloma continually rearranges into new installations, a sense of familiarity arises – a sensory, physical recollection that opens up a connection to human history and its close relationship with the material wood.