Post By Tiffany Brady

Marela Zacarías is an artist from Mexico City, Mexico, specializing in the merging of sculpture and paint in a rather flowing way. Zacarías’s work embodies the challenge of making a sculpture fold and fall in the same way fabric may, while also filling her pallets full of color and vibrancy. Along with a large amount of pigment Zacarías uses, she also fills her winding sculptures with geometric shapes and designs. 

 According to  Zacarías’s profile written on Art21, most of her works are, “built from window screens, joint compound, and polymer before being painted in bold, geometric, abstract patterns.” 

As you would assume,  Zacarías’s process for making these intricately wound pieces is “labor- and research-intensive,” as claimed on her own artist site. Most of her pieces are even designed for the exhibit she is working for at the time. 

Art21 said, “Zacarías’s works are often inspired by the sites for which they are planned, such as Works Progress Administration murals in the Brooklyn Museum, Mayan textile colors for an installation in Mexico, and a map of Brooklyn for a new hotel in the borough.” 

Not only has Zacarías taken part in numerous exhibitions, but she has also held solo exhibits and even commissioned large-scale permanent pieces for “Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, Facebook, the William Vale in Brooklyn, and the U.S. Consulate in Monterrey, Mexico,” according to her site. 

The Brooklyn Paper also looked into these lively sculptures, saying, “Like much of Zacarias’s work, the sculptures are meant to interact with the architecture of a specific communal space — the pieces, resembling huge, living blankets, seem to have just finished crawling the walls and balconies of the museum’s cavernous entrance lobby.”

Zacarías’s way of breathing life into her sculptures translates with every twist and turn of the surprisingly harden sculptures she manifests. 

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