Nerea Azanza
Nerea Azanza is an emerging Spanish visual artist based in Paris. Due to her scientific background and experience in cultural heritage restoration, she is passionate about experimenting with diverse materials, investigating spatial patterns, and developing visual mutations and cloning.
She holds a Ph.D. in Fine Arts and an MFA in Conservation-Restoration of Cultural Heritage from the Fine Arts Faculty of the Complutense University of Madrid (UCM, Spain), where she studied with artist Antonio López García and worked as an art teacher. She has been a preventive conservator-restorer specializing in wax anatomical models at the Javier Puerta Museum (Faculty of Medicine of the UCM) and The Museum of Human Evolution (Burgos, Spain) in collaboration with Professor J. L. Arsuaga.
Back to making art in 2018, she stood as a finalist in the Clavecin en France art contest 2022, with Fabienne Verdier as jury president, and was a semi-finalist in the COCA PROJECT 2020. She has been part of group exhibitions in Europe and the USA. Her first solo show took place in Paris in 2021 with Galerie Estrella. She exhibited for the first time in a museum, the Unterlinden (Colmar, France), in 2022 due to the Clavecin en France contest. In 2024, some of her works were selected for the Lunar Codex with 33 Contemporary Gallery. They will be launched to the moon in the Codex Polaris mission, part of NASA's Artemis Program, in September 2025.
Artist Statement
I call my vision Art in Expansion. Without sketch support, each artwork begins with a little portrait that I transform multiple times and expand in space with modules, giving the painting a larger scale. I am an abstract figurative mixed-media painter working on paper, wood, linen, and handcrafted eco-friendly textiles.
These figures, reunited in the form of installations, suggest the pieces of a puzzle that I connect with organic, precise lines following an intuitive process. I want to defy the viewer's credulity in the abstract field like hyperrealist painters do in the figurative one. With this purpose, I paint high-definition, machine-quality lines entirely freehand.
My art is about the instant—an innate rhythm where apparent complexity gets reduced into a dynamic flow. I challenge spatial limitations to show that the world is a whole in motion. Beginning and end find a common ground. Regardless of disruptions and impermanence, our system shows remarkable resilience through transformation. Everything lives in expansion, differentiated and connected at once.
Studying Japanese aesthetics, Mother Nature's behavior, and the tribulations of the human condition are my sources of inspiration. Important influences in my visual language are Picasso's portraits, the vibrant color of the hard-edge painting movement, the lines of Chillida, Zaha Hadid, Antoni Gaudí, and contemporary parametric architectural design.
www.azanza.art
