(Langreo, 1978)

María Vallina (Asturias, 1978) holds a PhD in Fine Arts from the Complutense University of Madrid, having completed her thesis entitled “Encounters on the boundary between art and theatre: the installation as a dramatic space” in 2015.

She combines her artistic practice with academic research, developing exhibition projects, participating in conferences, undertaking research stays, and receiving awards and grants for artistic research, notably that from the Royal Academy of Spain in Rome (MAEC-AECID 2009–10).

In the academic sphere, she is a member of the research group “The Body in Contemporary Art: Image and Subject” at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the Complutense University of Madrid (UCM), and “Aesthetics and Philosophy of the Image” at the University of Zaragoza (UZ); she is also an associate lecturer at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Teruel, University of Zaragoza.

Through my work, I seek the mechanism of seduction that gives vent to the spiritual, to the occult; the stimulation of the unsaid, triggered by the visual artwork.
Art can bring to life what does not exist; it can keep alive what is almost dead, and it is within these existential limits that it makes sense, that it lives.

My work revolves around the boundary. In painting, I seek the suspended moment, the point of no return where a person ceases to be themselves and returns to their instincts. There, they are transformed into a beast, into an animal. The uninhabited space gives rise to the tension and aggression born of the limitations of being, of torn emotions, and of the artistic passion of suffering.