Michelle Garcia Aguilar use color and form to process personal experiences and engage with unresolved memories. Her work draws on the complexities of these memories, allowing hidden narratives to surface through abstraction and form. She explores themes of self-perception, internalized beliefs, and identity—using painting as a way to navigate and confront these deeply personal subjects. Guided by an intuitive process, she allows each painting to evolve organically—embracing uncertainty as the paint and brush take on a life of their own.
Aguilar's Mexican heritage informs her visual language, influencing the way she navigates themes of identity and the tension between visibility and concealment. This cultural lens adds another layer of complexity to her exploration of personal and collective memory.
Aguilar's practice moves fluidly between abstraction and figuration, allowing these two approaches to merge and create tension. This interplay reflects the fluid and often contradictory nature of identity and memory, blurring the line between what is remembered and what is felt. While her process is open-ended and intuitive, these recurring themes emerge organically, reflecting the unconscious ways personal and cultural forces shape her inner world. By leaving room for ambiguity, she invites viewers to engage with the work on their own terms and discover personal meanings.
Influenced by abstract expressionism, she embraces the movement’s emphasis on emotional immediacy and gesture. Through this language of raw energy and spontaneity, she navigates the complexities of personal memory and cultural identity, translating them into a visual form that is both deeply personal and open to interpretation. At its core, her practice is driven by a need to give form to what is often unspoken—turning personal and collective experiences into a visual language that bridges the seen and the felt.
Through this ongoing dialogue between memory and material, Aguilar's work reflects the complexities of identity while offering viewers a space to engage with their own hidden truths.
