Los Frescos, Acrylic on Recycled Cardboard Box, 2011

I was born in Caracas, Venezuela (1972). I´ve painted since I was 15 years old. I´ve got a degree in Fine Arts (Venezuelan University) , an MA in Art Therapy (Barcelona University)and an MSc in Social Development (Queen Margaret University).

I have participated as a guest artist in the Havana Biennale (Cuba,2012) and the Cuenca Biennale (2001) among others. Although I am quite well known in Venezuela my work is still underground and not within the mainstream.

At the moment I´m kind of obsessed with the female portrait because it seems to me that this genre has always been dominated by men. The truth is that, with the exception of Frida Kahlo, painting has been, in art history books, a male dominated subject.My portraits attempt to rescue women´s views of themselves. I want to challenge the status-quo in this respect.

The last painting that I admired was “Judith Slaying Holofernes” by the Italian Baroque artist Artemisia Gentileschi. I also like Barbara Kruger, Ana Mendieta, Tamara de Lempicka and Anselm Kiefer among others.

People have told me that my paintings have a lot of strength that the women in my portraits seem to have a secret behind the canvas, maybe they have a knife, they are all “Judith” after and before some kind of symbolic decapitation.

At the Habana Biennale my work was performance-based. I think performance is the most complex form of art. I promised myself I’d become a pure performance artist by the age of 70 – I still have 30 years to achieve that!

Resting, Acrylic & Spray on Canvas

See more of Blanca’s work at http://www.blancahaddad.com/

See more of Blanca’s most recent work here http://blancahaddadstudio.wordpress.com/