About

Brenda Uribe is a visual artist from Cancún, Mexico. Her work moves between painting and sculpture as two languages that complete each other: painting as the memory of colour, sculpture as the body of emotion. She works in acrylic and mixed media on canvas and wood, in ceramics — RAKU among them — in direct-modelled sculpture, and in assemblage built from materials gathered where she lives.

She came to painting with no training and no plan. It was 2014, and she sat down in front of a canvas to quiet her anxiety. She stayed. Not knowing how to draw, she painted what she felt in the abstract; later she learned to draw so she could work figuratively. Oil led to mixed media, mixed media to clay, clay to carving wood. She trained as an assistant to working masters — among them the Oaxacan painter Damián Lescas — and took a tool from each.

Her work explores what binds women, land, and Caribbean spirituality. The same figures return: woman as guardian of the territory, bougainvillea, birds, the sea and the wind, Mayan roots reinterpreted, pre-Hispanic symbols carried into textile. The register is Caribbean and contemporary, figurative and dreamlike, heavy with symbol. Her work is shown in galleries and cultural spaces across Quintana Roo, and travels to private collections in Mexico, the United States, and Europe.

She works in collections, not one-offs: more than three hundred pieces across a dozen series that answer one another. Tejiendo Orígenes and Ecos del Origen look to the root; Mar en la Piel and Ecos del Arrecife, to the water; Antropología Fantástica imagines its inhabitants; A Ojos Cerrados and Habitarse close the eyes to look inward.

She also works in interiors, collaborating with architects on houses conceived around the art — open, generous rooms that stay close to the landscape — placing existing pieces or making the one a particular corner asked for. The first house they finished sold; she lives in the second.