Marela Zacarías creates painted sculptures of undulating forms with the quality of fabric, bodies filled with movement and expressive quality. Zacarías painterly vocabulary is the territory of unexpected encounters and intersections.  Through their colorful elegant presence Zacarías’ works are a generous opening to others and their history.

 

Working with a labor- and research-intensive process, Marela Zacarías moulds window screen and plaster to fabricate her works. The sculptures’ surfaces are populated by socially committed geometric abstractions––shapes and patterns born from the artist’s study of the history and specificity of the site of work.

 

She most recently completed a monumental site-specific permanent installation “Chalchiuhtlicue” at the new International Arrivals Facility at the Seattle airport which will soon open to the public.  The work is comprised by five 50 feet sculptures suspended in the air that were fabricated and painted in Seattle by Marela and her team over a period of twenty months. Zacarías works span from large installations to small intimate works. 

 

Zacarías has held solo exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum, Sapar Contemporary, Praxis Gallery, the National Arts Club, and Art at Viacom in New York; at MadArt Studio in Seattle, WA; at Wasserman Projects, Detroit, the Brattleboro Museum, Vermont and Galería Alterna in Mexico City. She has taken part in group exhibitions at Smack Mellon, BRIC, the British Society of American Art, Praxis Gallery, Y Gallery, No Longer Empty and El Museo del Barrio in New York; the Mexican Cultural Institute in Washington DC, Wasserman Projects in Detroit and at CCSU Art Gallery in New Britain, CT. 

She has received large-scale permanent site-specific commissions from NYU Langone, NY, NY; Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, Seattle, WA; Facebook HQ, Menlo Park, CA; The Trammell Crow Center, Dallas, TX;  the William Vale in Brooklyn, NY and the U.S. Consulate in Monterrey, Mexico among others. Her murals can be found in Washington, D.C., Virginia, Connecticut, Ohio, Mexico, and Guatemala.  She has held residencies at Pilchuck Glass School, MadArt, the Vermont Studio Center; the University of Connecticut, Storrs; and the Corcoran School of Art, Washington, D.C., among others. She was profiled in Art21’s “New York Close Up” series in 2013, 2014, and 2016.

Zacarías received her BA from Kenyon College, Gambier, Ohio, and her MFA from Hunter College, New York. She is represented by Sapar Contemporary in New York and Galería Alterna in Mexico City.  She currently lives between Brooklyn and Mexico City.