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Isabel Iacona

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Isabel Iacona

Isabel iacona


Isabel Iacona (born Buenos Aires, 1955) is an Argentine artist known for her detailed paintings of enlarged flowers and pop portraits of people and pets, which she paints during off flower seasons. She uses several mediums: oil on canvas, mixed techniques, watercolors and drawings. She has commissioned works in Europe and The Americas, residing in numerous countries where her work reflected local botany.

Contents

Isabel iacona confidential private collection


Childhood and education

As a child, she learnt drawing with Argentine Informalist artist Enrique Barilari, who was a friend of her father´s. She was later mentored by Leopoldo Presas, member of the Academia Nacional de Bellas Artes de Argentina (National Academy of Fine Arts) and President of Sociedad Argentina de Artistas Plásticos. She also studied with Julio Güero, Maria Luisa Manasero and Ana Eckell, Argentine Artist selected to represent Argentina at Venice Biennale, 1997. She completed her school education at Northlands School, and got her college degree at Santa Ana School of Fine Arts in Buenos Aires in 1980 and later attended La Sorbonne in Paris. Her father´s work for a shipping company had the family relocating often and that shaped her interest to reside in different lands. Sharing the daily lives of people in places is part of her work and life.

Career

During the 80s, she moved to Punta del Este, Uruguay where she worked as a professional landscape designer planning and designing gardens and parks. This work would be the basis of what later became her body of work: floral art. She started painting florals taking her day work under the sun as an inspiration. So she would work during the day, and paint at night. Her flowers are a synthesis of what she sees, not hyperrealist renditions of her subjects.

These flowers serve to classify the perturbing confusion of details in Nature: first there is an analysis and then a mental synthesis displayed on the canvas. Isabel Iacona´s thoughts are, in both processes, guided by her aesthetic emotions: her strong sense of color master the floral scene as reconstructed by her in her painting. Not disdainful of realistic imitations, nevertheless she tries to capture the essence of what she is pointing.

In the late 80s she moved back to Argentina where she started showing her paintings in Buenos Aires galleries. She also participated in the Centro de Arte y Communicacion (CAYC) Biennal organized by art critic Jorge Glusberg.

In 1990, Argentine Museo Nacional de Arte Decorativo ( National Museum of Decorative Arts) selected one of her works, Sunset Flowers, as an Argentine present to China. It became one of the first works by an Argentinian artist in the Hangzhou Art Center´s collection. Her artworks are in collections in places she has lived.

In 1992 she moved to Kinsale, Ireland to participate in a collective exhibition in the Arts Council, Bank of Ireland which lead to a year of work in Ireland. While there, she deepened her interest in poetry, that she displayed in portraits that she painted during the winter time. In 1993, she moved to Paris to work on her flower artworks and commissioned portraits. Her work took her to the US where she lived in several places, starting in Austin, Texas where she worked on a site specific work for a Catholic Chapel. After Austin, she spent two years in New Orleans, one of the places she had lived in her childhood. In 1996 she moved to New York where she continued to work till 1999.

In 1998, one of her works was selected to participate in the prestigious Salón Nacional de Artes Plásticas at Palais de Glace, Buenos Aires. That year, the exhibition was held in the city of Paraná, Entre Ríos.

With the nomination for Salón Nacional, she traveled to Argentina and decided to stay and reconnect with her Argentine roots and fellow artists. She studied aesthetics with Professor and Researcher Lucas Salvador Fragasso. "El debate estético contemporáneo" (Contemporary Aesthetics Debate) evolved around concepts such as aesthetic experience, artistic autonomy, artwork analysis based on philosophic texts from Th. Adorno, W. Benjamin, M. Heidegger and others such as Hal Foster, G. Didi-Huberman, Rosalind Krauss. In 2000 she gave birth to her daughter. During that period, she started painting flowers on larger canvases and many of her works focused on pop portraits of children, that she would get commissioned by friends and people who wanted to take advantage of the fact that she was back in the country. By 2014, requests for commissioned works from Europe had piled up and she and her daughter moved to London, returning to Argentina 2016.

Recognitions

  • LXXXVII Salón Nacional de Artes Plásticas, Secretaría de Cultura de la Presidencia de la Nación. Painting and Sculpture. Palais de Glace. Selected artist, 1998. Exhibited at Museo Provincial de Bellas Artes de Paraná, Argentina.
  • Museums

  • Museo Nacional de Arte Decorativo, National Museum of Decorative Arts Buenos Aires, Argentina
  • New Orleans Museum of Art, New Orleans, USA
  • Randoll Hall, Natchez, Louisiana, USA
  • Hangzhou Museum of Art, Hangzhou, China
  • References

    Isabel Iacona Wikipedia