BIO
elisa ortega montilla is an artist who works and exhibits between the U.S and Spain, and after many years in California now resides in Barcelona. Following a decade of international social work, she completed a Master of Fine Arts at the University of California in 2019. Her work has been featured in The Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, Hyperallergic, KCRW, LUM Art Magazine, and the University of California's Women's Month, among other places. Her projects have been shown in solo and group exhibitions, and art fairs in Spain, Guatemala, Mexico, China, and the U.S, including the Torrance Art Museum, the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, the San Luis Obispo Museum of Art and most recently, at the Textile Art Biennial at Est_Art Space in Madrid. She has received numerous awards, grants and residencies, including from the Rafael Botí Foundation, California Arts Council, Sustainable Arts Foundation, and Vermont Studio Center, among others. She recently completed the Independent Studies Programme at MACBA (The Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art).
STATEMENT
Growing up in the decades after Spain’s transition from dictatorship to democracy, echoes of scarcity and a legacy of thriftiness led me to center my practice on transmuting discarded objects and materials to infuse them with new meaning. I make sculptures from reclaimed wood, rewriting its history while maintaining past traces. Ideas of displacement, movement, and transformation intermix with the eco-feminist vision that underlays all my work.
My first solo museum show at the San Luis Obispo Museum of Art (California), Objectifying, explored the body in a sensual way through non-binary anthropomorphic forms made out of found wood and second-hand undergarments. These bodily suggestions, sensual movements and feminine shapes were a soft invocation of the human body.
My most recent body of work, Impresiones Corporales: ejercicios de aproximación (exhibited in September 2024 in Barcelona), is composed of sculptures, drawings, photography, a videoart installation and performances. It displayed a collaborative new approach to my practice, in which I aimed to break the boundaries that exist between art and audience to construct new imaginaries. By opening my practice to others, I created connections between people through physical gathering, togetherness, dialogue and creative exploration.