Biography
Paulina López Macedo
Salta, Argentina, 2008
Paulina López Macedo has been living and studying in Buenos Aires since 2022. She is currently in her senior year of high school at Northfield School, a bilingual institution in Buenos Aires. Academically, she stands out as the top student in her class and has an advanced level of English.
Her connection to art began early in María Eugenia Muñoz’s studio, where she participated between the ages of 4 and 8, and continued later through self-taught practice in her home studio. From a very young age, guided by an intuitive exploration, she experimented with various media and visual languages, including paper, canvas, murals, models, and miniatures.
In 2024, she recognized a distinct direction in her work that she embraced as her own and as defining of her identity: large-format, mixed-media projects featuring figurative representation. Her work reveals a sustained attention to detail and a remarkable mastery of drawing. Her pieces explore connections, reflecting a zeitgeist contextualized within her youthful contemporaneity, yet closely tied to her personal life and history.
With a well-defined body of work, she held her first solo exhibition at Espacio Are Zona—San Isidro, Buenos Aires—and began to deepen her training in anatomy with the artist Abril Barrado, both through workshops and personalized instruction.
During 2025 and 2026, she undertook a curatorial program focused on the local and international art scenes, visiting various institutions as part of cultural internships. The discovery of major influences transformed her perspective and added complexity to her second collection. In it, she focused on constructing compositions in which spatiality takes center stage, projecting sensations associated with bodies, environments, and ways of inhabiting a space, through an imagery rich in symbolism and a growing conceptual acuity.
As a continuation of this process, Paulina is preparing to pursue formal academic training in the arts, planning to apply to universities in the United States for Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA) programs with admission in 2027. Previously, she was accepted to participate in the New York Summer Intensive Studies—Painting (Pre-College) program at Parsons—The New School in July 2026.
Artworks
In 2024, I began to recognize in my work a sense of having developed my own root: a personal way of seeing, composing, and constructing images. Although my language is still in development, these works mark a starting point from which I am beginning to expand my practice.
The works presented here bring together different explorations in large-scale formats, mixed media, and figurative representation. They include relationships, bodies, spaces, and imaginaries connected to my personal history, my surroundings, and the ways in which I perceive intimacy, memory, and the experience of inhabiting a place.
Artist Statement
I understand painting as a form of knowledge. I do not paint only to represent an image, but to think through it: to observe, organize an emotion, recognize an experience, and transform it into something that can continue to act upon others.
My work begins with a very direct relationship between life and art. I am interested in faces, bodies, scenes, and gestures because they reveal something that cannot always be expressed in words. Painting allows me to construct that intermediate space between the intimate and the shared: an image is born from a personal experience, but it is completed when someone is able to find something of their own within it.
I work from a rigorous technical pursuit. I am interested in anatomy, proportion, craftsmanship, and the construction of the image, but also in the possibility of breaking or expanding those boundaries. For me, learning is a central part of artistic practice: learning through education, from other artists, through observation, and from everything the world offers when it is looked at with attention.
I do not think of my artistic identity as something fixed, but as a process in development. I know that I still have much to learn, and that awareness does not weaken my determination; it makes it clearer. My commitment is to grow, take on challenges, step outside my comfort zone, and dedicate my life to building work that is increasingly honest, precise, and profound.
Art is my way of being in the world. It is a way of feeling, thinking, and connecting. I aspire for my works not only to be looked at, but to leave a mark: to open a question, awaken an emotion, or transform, even if only for a moment, the way someone relates to themselves and to what surrounds them.
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Early Works Timeline
These early works trace Paulina’s self-taught visual practice from childhood, revealing an intuitive approach to color, composition, figuration, and image-making long before formal training became part of her artistic development.
Exploration was the principle that guided my relationship with materials and techniques. Drawing, painting, muralism, miniatures, models, and various supports appear as territories of experimentation, discovery, and expansion. Looking back at these works allows me to recognize a sensitivity connected to art in its most primary, noble, and intuitive forms: a visual experience born before the formalization of language, where gesture, imagination, and matter began to trace the first signs of a voice of my own.
5 Years Old - Early Works Timeline
An early exploration of landscape through vivid color and simplified forms. The composition already suggests an intuitive sense of spatial rhythm and visual structure.
5 Years Old — Lion
A bold animal portrait built through saturated color and expressive contrast. The work reveals an early interest in intensity, gesture, and emotional presence.
6 Years Old — Waterfall
An intuitive study of depth, atmosphere, and natural scenery. The image shows an early attempt to organize space through layers, light, and movement.
7 Years Old — Sailboat
A study of light, reflection, and horizon. The composition suggests an early attention to balance, color transitions, and the emotional quality of a scene.
8 Years Old — Bridge
An exploration of architecture, water, and reflection. The work introduces perspective and urban landscape as a way to structure the image.
8 Years Old — Trees / Seasons
A chromatic study of contrast and atmosphere. The composition plays with duality, rhythm, and the expressive possibilities of nature.
8 Years Old — Forest Landscape
An early landscape focused on texture, depth, and color layering. The work shows a growing interest in creating movement within the surface.
9 Years Old — Fragmented Portrait
An intuitive approach to cubist fragmentation and the construction of the face. The portrait explores emotion through geometry, distortion, and expressive line.
11 Years Old — Graphic Composition I
A dense visual composition built through repetition, saturation, and graphic rhythm. The work reveals an instinctive attraction to complexity and visual excess.
11 Years Old — Graphic Composition II
An energetic image where color, symbols, and characters coexist in a highly saturated field. The composition suggests an early interest in narrative fragmentation.
11 Years Old — Male Portrait
A graphic portrait based on sharp contrasts, stylized lines, and chromatic intensity. The work shows an early exploration of identity, attitude, and visual presence.
11 Years Old — Color Portrait
A study of the face through color planes and expressive modulation. The portrait begins to move toward a more emotional and psychological use of figuration.
11 Years Old — Monochrome Portrait
A reduced palette gives the image a strong graphic impact. The work explores likeness, contrast, and the expressive power of minimal color.
11 Years Old — Expressive Portrait
An early investigation of gaze, color, and emotional intensity. The portrait shows a growing attention to the face as a space of psychological expression.
12 Years Old — Close-up Portrait
A large-scale facial close-up focused on expression, distortion, and direct visual impact. The work anticipates Paulina’s later interest in faces as carriers of emotion.
13 Years Old — Portrait
A transitional work toward a more personal figurative language. Color, gesture, and facial expression begin to operate as tools for emotional construction.
Cutouts: Body, Work, and Space
Audiovisual and spatial documentation of a site-specific project, in which the works are activated in relation to the artist’s body and the exhibition space. Its inclusion expands the reading of the portfolio: it not only presents the final production, but also reveals the way Paulina thinks through scale, installation, movement, and the physical experience of the work within a specific context.
Cutouts: Body, Work, and Space
2024
Site-specific project / photographic installation / audiovisual documentation
Photographs mounted on foam board, spatial installation, and video
Variable dimensions
Gallery Art in Buenos Aires, Arentina.
