Photograph by Elías Herrera Zacarías
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 presence her 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 with geometric abstractions, shapes and patterns rooted in the history of the site that inspired the work, global textiles, and traditional weaving practices, the history of Abstraction, the organic patterns found in nature and in her own subconscious. The abstract nature of the work allows these stories and histories to be reshaped, reformed, and presented anew, incorporating traditional elements into a distinctly contemporary practice. Zacarías works span from large installations to small intimate works.
She most recently completed a monumental site-specific permanent installation “The Healing Shawl” at the NYU Langone Care Center in New York and “Chalchiuhtlicue” at the new International Arrivals Facility at the Seattle airport. “Storytelling,” her first solo exhibition on the West Coast was on view at the San Luis Obispo Museum of Art from March 20th to July 19th, 2023.
Zacarías has held solo exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum, Sapar Contemporary, Praxis Gallery, the National Arts Club, and Art at Viacom in New York; the San Luis Obispo Museum of Art in California; at MadArt Studio in Seattle, WA; at Wasserman Projects, Detroit, MI; 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. 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 a BA and an Honorary Doctor in Fine Arts degree from Kenyon College, Gambier, Ohio, and her MFA from Hunter College, New York. She currently lives between Brooklyn and Mexico City.