TOKYO: Spanish artist Cristina Banban is currently exhibiting a series of figurative works produced in 2023 at the Espace Perrotin in Tokyo in an exhibition titled “Figura.” 

The exhibition started on July 5 and runs through to August 19. It is her first Tokyo exhibition and coincides with the publication of her monograph.

The young artist’s work includes many references to modern and contemporary art. She sublimates the female body with generous shapes and paints women with protruding eyes without pupils and with prominent hands. Removing the pupils directs the artist’s work into abstraction.

The evidence of affiliation with her Spanish and American peers is clear in both the colors and shape of the faces. These peers include Picasso, with his “demoiselles d’Avignon”, and Willem de Kooning before the blossoming of abstract expressionism.

The mixed techniques of oil, acrylic, charcoal and pastel are skillfully arranged to go in the expressionist direction of the work and its subject.

Her paintings and monumental works of more than 2 meters by 160 cm bring flesh and volume in the sanitized space of the virtual worlds increasingly present in our contemporary era.