Handprints left by the artist Lia Sambuesa
Written by David Knoll
9/1/2023
Lia Sambuesa’s painting practice combines motifs with a variety of elements that make up the artist’s biography, such as diaries, photos, pages from a notebook, fingerprints and palm prints with a grid or lattice made of short strokes of oil paint.
Several years ago, Lia decided to use the image of a hand in her work. For the artist, palms are an origin story: children trace their contours to create more complex drawings, parents save the handprints of their sons and daughters as a keepsake, and fate is inscribed with lines on the palms. There are no two identical hands in the world. This is a kind of birth certificate, a reliable way of identification. In the works presented at the exhibition, Lia Sambuesa uses photographs of her hands, copies of personal documents, her children’s drawings and photographs. Bright mesh patterns safely hide this autobiography from the curious glances of viewers. It is necessary to strain your eyes to see something intimate and individual in a multi-layered sparkling and vibrating image.
Since childhood, Lia Sambuesa kept diaries and wrote novels. When she started doing fine arts, she already had something to tell, but she had to find her individual style and suitable tools. Now Lia has her own unique style of pictorial storytelling: deeply personal facts fitted into a wide variety of geometric structures and patterns.
All works by Lia Sambuesa are in some way autobiographical. Her early canvases included pages from school notebooks, all personal notes, marginal drawings, teachers’ marks and comments, stickers on the cover and expressive scribbles scratching the paper into holes. While working on these paintings, Lia rethought a particular and, to her, traumatic school experience and learned to talk about herself and comprehend the world through art.
Lia Sambuesa plans the next project while working on the current one because she is convinced that each new work will result from the previous one. What we will see at her next exhibition after such a dynamic and intimate exhibition as ‘Warm My Palms’ is anyone’s guess.
David Knoll has published widely on international modernism and in 2011 was a Center for Curatorial Leadership Fellow. From 2017-21, in addition to his role in the department, he served as Curator in Charge of the Leonard A. Lauder Research Center for Modern Art and now sits on the Advisory Committee. David holds a Ph.D. from the University of Aberdeen.
