About Christina

Christina Oiticica was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 1951. she has lived in Geneva since 2008.

She studied at the School of Fine Arts in Rio de Janeiro (1969-1975), Architecture at Bennett University Center (1976-1980) and the Circle of Fine Arts of Madrid (1986 and 1990).

She has always worked with feminine signs: the food of life, fertility, maternal spirituality and the feminine universe; at first she was completely unconscious.

In 2003, she relocates to the Pyrenees region of France. At the time she was preparing an exhibition in Paris for which she had to paint large canvases. She lived in a hotel where there was no place to set up an artists studio, so she began working on her paintings outside. One morning, she noticed that leaves had fallen and insects had landed on the paintings at night and mixed with the paint, which pleased her immensely.

She went on to develop techniques in which paintings are buried, left in riverbeds, attached to trees in forests and soforth. Recently she has been working with salt, and in 2022 left her paintings in the Salinas de Marsala in Sicily. After some time she uses a product to stop the effects of nature on her paintings. Christina understood that her work was about leaving the walls of the Art Studio, she became a partner of nature and her work somehow received her fingerprint by being outside.

Christina believes there is a powerful partnership, because when she removes a work from nature there is always a big surprise! No matter where she left it, whether it be the Amazon in Brazil, Pyrenees in France, Camino de Santiago in Spain, Way of Kumano in Japan or Assisi in Italy, she is always thrilled and delighted to discover what the hands of nature have made of her original artworks.

She believes that it is an art that cannot be imitated and in each case the action of water, wind and the mystery of stones and the soil interact in a unique way in their work. She does her part of the work and after returning to the earth, completes a period of telluric gestation and then the work is brought back from the natural enviroment.

For Cristina, working on this theme corresponds to working with the Sacred, the Great Mother, the Immaculate Conception. Painting is like a seed that transforms and grows.

The end product of all this is something very important to her. For her, it’s not just something visual, but a whole energy involved in this transformation.