Mara De Luca
Night Landscape Tondo II, 2016
Mixed media on canvas with black nickel plated element
16 inch diameter
Night Landscape Tondo II, 2016
Mixed media on canvas with black nickel plated element
16 inch diameter
Mara De Luca’s paintings evoke memory of place. Through her use of color and texture, De Luca’s atmospheric abstractions conjure dusk monochromes, nighttime clouds, fiery sunsets, and planetary orbs in direct response to the contrasting beauty of the Southern California landscape and the bleakness of the state’s industrial freeways. Her practice involves fusing disparate concepts such as the glossy advertising of high fashion brands and an expressionistic painting technique filtered through her experience of having lived and worked in Los Angeles. In her atmospheric abstractions, De Luca interrogates ideas of illusionism, romanticism, and the sublime, with a deeply informed response to modernist painting. Referencing literature and poetry, the artist allows her experience of these diverse elements to shape her work, imbuing a
sense of reflected ambient light. Mara De Luca earned her M.F.A. from California Institute of the Arts (Valencia, CA) in 2004 and B.A. Columbia University, Department of Visual Arts (New York, NY) in 1995. De Luca is a recipient of the 2019 California Community Foundation Fellowship for Visual Artists. She has taught Painting at UC San Diego, UC Irvine, UC Davis, and UC Riverside all in California as a visiting professor. De Luca has held multiple solo and group exhibitions internationally including: the Irvine Fine Arts Center (Irvine, CA); the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (La Jolla, CA); Institute of Arab and Islamic Art (IAIA) (Rahaal, Qatar); Quint Projects (San Diego, CA); Totah (New York, NY); Nevelson Chapel (New York, NY); Ben Maltz Gallery, Otis College of Art and Design (Los Angeles, CA); and Palm Springs Art Museum (Palm Springs, CA). Mara De Luca lives and works in New York, NY.