Donna Huanca

Berlin-based Bolivian American artist Donna Huanca (born 1980) practices a type of femme mark-making rooted in scientific and natural phenomena, Andean futurism and meditative practices. She utilizes materials that have a direct relationship to nature—such as raw pigment, oil, turmeric, sand, hair and clay—as key elements in her paintings, sculptures and “skin paintings,” which treat flesh as both canvas and performative tool. Donna Huanca: Obsidian Ladder accompanies the artist’s first large-scale presentation in the United States at the Marciano Art Foundation in Los Angeles. Describing her approach to the site, Huanca says, “I perceive space as both cohesive and elusive, something that can be activated at several levels. By virtue of their powerful presence, the models facilitate a transitory process that captures and develops the space. The models become a kind of respiratory system of temporality and deconstruction. They sense and feel the space, leaving it changed.”

This publication documents a multimedia installation by Berlin- and New York–based artist Donna Huanca (born 1980) at the Belvedere Museum in Vienna. Sculptures, large-format painting, video, soundscapes and nude models, whose bodies are transformed by paint and textiles, create parallels to the museum’s simultaneous exhibition of Egon Schiele’s paintings.