Macarena Yanez

Born in 1982 in Santiago, Chile, Macarena graduated from Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London with an MA and previously, a BFA from University of Chile. She is currently touring key locations and dates from San Francisco to Taipei, then on to London and Paris. Her home-base is Santiago, Chile.

Macarena explores ideas associated with urban existence and the ‘concrete jungle’ where the metropolitan condition implies that people have lost their essential connection to nature. She applies her visual imagery to forgotten walls within the city performing artistic interventions on the built-environment. Using the iconography of nature, Macarena reactivates urban architecture and through her art making repossesses spaces to make them part of our daily life again. Her collage technique is refined and ultimately pasted to large-scale murals resulting in installations loosely defined as Street Art.

The ultra-modern environment and the timelessness of her work provokes a clash between space and time. Macarena’s recycled material mixes subject genres and human stereotypes of a bygone eras in the printed paper medium. She manipulates cut birds, flowers and predominantly female characters to create surreal and fictional worlds. The illogical use of scale and juxtaposition of hybrid figures populating these microcosms, adds further to the meaning that nature is taking a stand. These utopian characters take on anthropomorphic form and enact narratives which remind us of scenes taken from our daily lives.

Macarena’s work stimulates the passer-by, pointing out every day spaces previously beyond our sight. In Taipei, her objective view draws together her ideas and methods in a fresh and new context. Each mural is transformed by its unique reflection of culture and surroundings.

Macarena Yanez is awarded the 2015 Creative Talents of Bamboo Curtain Studio (BCS). She is invited by BCS for a two month residency at the studio.