Biography
Kabriele Rosas was born in Mexico City. She spent her childhood between the limits of suburbs and slums. At an early age this awakened her curiosity for different cultures and the conditions of life in poverty. She has been living in different places where the contrast between rich and poor was quite extreme. Places such as an island off the coast of Brazil, a village orphanage in Mozambique, Mexico City, as well as rural towns in the United States. She became interested in art at an early age, and began experimenting by assembling abandon toys, broken machines, adding natural pigments and oil paint. She loved turning these unconventional objects into colorful sculptures and incorporation them into her paintings.
For her secondary education she attended ''Cedart Frida Kahlo'' in Mexico City, affiliated with the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes (Institute of Fine Arts). There she studied and specialized in fine arts; however, this was part of a multidisciplinary education including dance, theater, music and fine arts.
In Los Angeles the artist received and education while attending a Master Program in drawing and painting at the Art Academy of Los Angeles. In addition to this she also participated in sculpture workshops at the Robert Cunningham Sculpture Studio. Also during her LA years she held her first solo exhibition ''TheOr". Which was held in Santa Monica, CA at the Bergamont Station Center.
She began traveling in her own country and experiencing life in rural communities. The everyday encounters with nature, culture and agriculture was the first fuel for her passion of nature and how they eat and grow their food, what they believe in and how they express themselves as a culture. These experiences from her travels would come to be the general themes in her artwork in the future. Focusing on nature, culture and food politics, finding the point where the natural world meets her art always as with a touch of her own culture, taking the place of where death and darkness were present in her painting for many years prior.
She started getting involved with development work, which took her to different countries. Kabriele started a program with an NGO in Massachusetts followed by 6 months of living in a coastal fishing village outside of Maputo, Mozambique in Southern Africa. There she worked with cultural and agricultural education at a boarding school for orphans and street kids. Her work at that time was dark using a limited palette of oils and acrylics. Her subject matter concerned death, witchcraft and the occult.
The children at the school would remark at how scary, spooky and horrible her paintings were and how they made them feel. It was this reaction that caused her to think deeply about the motivation for her subject matter. She began incorporating a new palette using lighter, brighter colors, she called one of her first paintings of this time; Pink Seduction.
She had an exhibit, ''Santuario Ambulante'', at Nucleo de arte in Maputo, the capital of Mozambique with a local painter, Tsenane.
Both Painters were exploring the many similarities in their obscure cultures where again witchcraft and the occult were present in their body of work. A local newspaper sponsored the exhibition.
She had a brief journey through Europe before returning to Massachusetts where she continued with her journey in development work. Her artwork took on new life and her palette, now full of vibrant colors, was greatly influenced by the contrast she'd seen between rich and poor and the rural and crowded slums scenarios. Working and living in different communities in Brazil. Mexico and Mozambique, She started using crowded compositions imitating the way poor people live in many parts of the world.
Kabriele moved to an Island in the Pacific Northwest to continue her journey growing food and studying and understanding food politics and rural conditions; therefore incorporating these as the themes for her artwork. A number of the pieces from this period are based on detailed selected images of past work blended with her new primary subject matter. This can be seen in Mono-Cropping Madness, where she uses spatulas and different rubber tools as part of her process and technique. The artist starts her pieces by creating an under painting mapping out the first layer of the main composition, manipulating it with rubber tools and found object. She uses different oil solution and plays with the composition imitating the many layers of a forest, jungle or coral reefs, applying many layers in the whole process. Another method, which she uses, is removing her prescription glasses to distortion parts of the composition. Some observers notice the blurry effect in some of her pieces. She started playing even more with her own sigh deficiency as part of her painting process.
Rosas is now settled in Seattle. She's showing in galleries such as, Gallery 110 and Art in the Ridge, as well as other alternative and group shows. She is passionate and is always investigating about food politics and nature. Her paintings and titles are inviting and provoking people for dialogue and debates in the issue, she wants to raise awareness in the matter incorporation her own stories and travels. Her pieces give a sense of organic patterns, nature and abstractions of forest, jungles and lately coral reefs and tide pools. She is newly inspired by, what other than , her habitat of the fresh , green, open communities of the Pacific Northwest.
She has sold a number of paintings to private collectors from around the world.
Her private collectors are form Ireland, Mozambique, Brazil, Mexico, USA and Denmark. Not only they are interested in the artist artwork and titles but also inspired by her character, personality and the way she lives. Her collectors tell her that they are reminded of their own adventures and travels, and their imaginations can transform for some time remembering and appreciating a beautiful, natural world. They can forget their hectic life for a moment. Forget about all the distractions, and sink back into a colorful world that keep changing every time they look at it, they found different compositions and discover new details in different perspectives and lighting conditions. |
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