Stephano Espinoza Galarza

Bio: Stephano Espinoza Galarza (Guayaquil, Ecuador, 1992) is a visual artist who has developed his work between Ecuador and the United States. His work explores primal narratives, fantasies and lost memories through painting, drawing and sculpture. He studied fine arts for a year at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and later earned a BA in Social and Cultural Analysis with concentrations in Latinx and Metropolitan Studies from New York University. He expects to receive his MFA in Painting and Printmaking from Yale University in 2023. He lives and works in New Haven.

Artist Statement: My work investigates primal narratives, fantasies and lost memories through painting, drawing and sculpture. The places, figures and specters that appear in my work are vessels holding tales of moral ambiguity. I want to see how these fictions unfold in visual and written language and how they operate within my body. 

The subject matter of my paintings and sculptures are forms undergoing transformation, oscillating between physical object, depiction, and fantasy. I source the content of my work from memory, photos, and observation; I am drawn to materials such as oil paint, dirt, foam, wood and canvas because of their textures, colors, smells, malleability and associative potential. I relocate different times and places to forms and images, attempting to uncover veiled experiences. Circular time, non-sequential narratives, and signifying chains frame the inner experience of my work and how it addresses the world. I draw inspiration from Surrealism and early Renaissance works, as well as from Andean cuir/queer literature and psychoanalysis. 

I am interested in inner physical and psychological spaces. By translating existing sculptures into a two-dimensional field of representation through observational painting, I hope to transport my audience into another space. What could it mean to resignifiy objects through different forms of representation? How can new meanings be established between forms? Through color, shifts in scale, and ways of rendering objects pictorially or reassembling objects into sculptural form, I propose new ways of looking, perceiving, and shifting the gaze of my audience. Through these works I hope to elicit questions of belonging, disorientation, and translation.

Selected Solo Exhibitions:  2021 las piernas me tiemblan de alegría, Media Agua (Quito), Juniin (Guayaquil) 2019 Un viaje por el camino agrietado del afecto, Más Arte, Quito, Ecuador Petricor, Khora, Quito, Ecuador

Selected Group Exhibitions & Residencies: 2022 The Night is Not Still, New Collectors Gallery, New York, USA
2021 Habitares (in)visibles, Centro de Arte Contemporáneo, Quito, Ecuador. There was only this world, this looted, ventriloquized Earth (online) hookart.com Carpe Diem (online) UTA Artist Space. Action Required, Green Hall Gallery, New Haven, USA 2020 Artist Residency at Centro de Arte Contemporáneo Quito (November 2020 - May 2021) 2019 Sala de Estar, Violenta, Guayaquil, Ecuador. SF, No Lugar, Quito, Ecuador
2018 Proyecto Waka, Arte Actual FLACSO, Quito, Ecuador. Utopias, Centro de arte Contemporaneo, Quito, Ecuador. El Orden Natural de las Cosas, Casa de la Cultura, Quito, Ecuador
2017 Soy Paisaje, Centro de Arte Contemporáneo, Quito, Ecuador
2016 UNIDEE University of Ideas Artist Residency, Fondazione Pistoletto, Biella, Italy. Arte Queer de Latino America, Little Berlin, Philadelphia, USA Borderless: In Perspective, Lite-Haus, Berlin, Germany. An Exhibition on Anger and Authenticity, BUFU Studios, New York, USA 2015 EMERGE Artist Residency, Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, New York, USA 2011 110th Annual Student Exhibition, Samuel M.V. Hamilton Building, Philadelphia, USA Bodies, Gallery 128, Philadelphia, USA 2010 YoungArts Visual Arts Exhibit, Margulies Collection at the Warehouse, Miami, USA

Honors & Awards: 2015 Metropolitan Studies CO-Chair Award, NYU 2011 Hannah Shickley Memorial Scholarship, PAFA 2010 Young Arts, Winner in Visual Arts

Eduction: 2023 MFA Painting and Printmaking, Yale University 2015 BA Social and Cultural Analysis, New York University NYU

Social: @stephano_eg