Maria Cobas
María Cobas was born in A Coruña in 1982. She studied architecture between her hometown and Denmark. She has lived in Denmark, the USA, and Italy. She worked as an architect for four years, but her passion for painting led her to devote herself to it exclusively from 2009.
Her work is poetic while also reflective and critical. In a symbolic gesture, she seeks to experiment with modes of sensitivity that contradict the urgency of a world that consumes and classifies everything, where historical hierarchies continue to shape what deserves to be seen, cared for, or heard. From the subtle and the unusual, she attempts to imagine other forms of relation that dismantle logics of supremacy and restore the value of the diverse, the vulnerable, and the unruly.
She currently collaborates with galleries such as La Panarteria (Madrid), Mecha (Santander), Tingting (Taiwan), Kafell (Zaragoza), and Espacio Líquido (Gijón). María’s work is included in private collections around the world, including Spain, Mexico, the USA, and Chile.
Artist Statement
My artistic practice is built as a symbolic response to contemporary ways of life marked by speed, constant productivity, and the logic of perpetual consumption. These dynamics not only affect our bodies and rhythms but also reproduce broader structures of domination, hierarchized ways of living that privilege what is useful, normative, and profitable.
Against that imposed pace that tends to homogenize bodies, desires, and relationships, I propose a visual universe where the elastic and the ambiguous take center stage. I am interested in opening symbolic spaces that question inherited narratives.
I work with hybrid figures, suspended settings, and compositions of hushed atmosphere to imagine forms of existence that do not need to fit into rigid molds. The characters inhabiting my work, between human, animal, and fantastic, are not defined by their function or efficiency but by their capacity to be, to accompany, to exist without being explained.
I am especially interested in the relationship with the natural, not as a passive environment but as a sensitive interlocutor. Clouds, organic creatures, and soft grounds compose an emotional landscape where difference is not corrected but welcomed. These bonds do not respond to the logic of use, but to an ethics of presence: being with the other without dominating, transforming, or demanding of them.
Color, rounded form, and the stillness of the image operate as subtle resistances to contemporary acceleration. Rather than confront through excess, my works propose a pause. A possibility for contemplation, for affection, for recognition of the other as legitimate in their difference.
In this symbolic gesture, my practice seeks to trial modes of sensitivity that contradict the urgency of a world that consumes and classifies everything, where historical hierarchies continue to shape what deserves to be seen, cared for, or listened to. From the delicate and the unusual, I attempt to imagine other forms of relation that disarm logics of supremacy and restore the value of the diverse, the vulnerable, and the unruly.
https://www.mariacobas.com/
