Cristina Lucas

Born in Jaén, Spain, in 1973. Lives and works in Madrid, Spain.

With her work, Cristina Lucas reminds us that art is a form of seduction through which to understand society. Interested in the mechanisms of power, Cristina Lucas analyses political and economic structures, dissecting them to reveal the contradictions between official history, reality and collective memory.

Encompassing a wide variety of media, from sculpture and painting to video, photography and performance, Lucas addresses information and structures it into cartographies, installations and images, to create potential –and always unfinished– interpretations of reality.

Cristina Lucas shows in her work how power systems are structured and how they influence us. Adopting macro and micro approaches, she analyzes political and economic structures, uncovering contradictions and implications that are not obvious.

His projects are the result of intense, long-term research processes. In his work, Lucas confronts and challenges the constructed narrative, the one we accept as factual or natural, looking for cracks that he can use to make them visible. This search for fissures in official history connects with her own biography in which feminism structured the tools of analysis and visibilization that we often find in her trajectory.
They often appropriate systems of classification and organization of reality – maps, flags, color charts, periodic table, stock market indexes, etc. – to reveal the close relationship between power and the control of knowledge and image.

Some of the less obvious connections between the construction of nation-states, the idea of economic development, progress, the exploitation of individuals and territories and its devastating consequences: wars, climate change, to name but a few. Lucas shows us that the current economic system, far from being an abstract concept, affects us in a very direct way, physically and materially, leaving marks on our bodies and landscapes understood in an indivisible way.

Her work has been presented in solo exhibitions at institutions such as MUDAM, Luxembourg; Kunstraum Innsbruck; Matadero, Madrid; Stedelijk Museum, Schiedam; Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo, Madrid; Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, Mexico City. She has also participated in the 28th Sao Paulo Biennial (2008) and the 10th Liverpool Biennial (2010), as well as in Manifesta 12 in Palermo.

Cristina Lucas’s works are present in international collections such as the Centre Pompidou, Paris; Fundación La Caixa, Barcelona; Banco de España, Madrid; Mudam, Luxembourg; FRAC Lorraine, Metz; IVAM, Valencia; KIASMA National Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinky; Van Abbe Museum, Eindhoven; Fundación NMAC Montenmedio Cádiz; The Coppel Collection, Mexico; and Bulgary Collection, Rome; among others.