Ángela Leyva

Ángela finds inspiration in learning about the lives of people and painting portraits of them without always personally knowing them. Her artistic process involves going into research ventures, from studying archival documents to gathering personal photographs of the people she is interested in. Throughout her work, it is possible to see a constant interest in the minimum unit of society: the individual as an inexhaustible source of research which provides the guidelines to understand humanity.

For her series Bilis Negra (Black Bile), she gathered the clinical files of people with congenital disease and created portraits based on their medical records. In order to maintain their anonymity, she distorted their faces by transferring their photographs into fabric and peeling them off with oil. She then asked her father, who is also a doctor, to diagnose the visual outcome of these images.

The series proposes a new way to imagine the lives of real life patients through portraiture, allowing the viewer to rediscover the fictional lives of imaginary characters.

–– textraño

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