Emilia Azcárate is a painter who explores unconventional and ever-expanding ways of creating marks and forms on canvas. She has been known in the past to use smoke stains and cow droppings to create her compositions, while she has made more recent paintings by cutting forms out of a stretched canvas with a scalpel, allowing the cutaway pieces to hang off the work. The results could be considered both painting and sculptural relief. For other works she cuts open and reveals the interior of notebooks. In Azcárate’s own words, “the stroke of the blade is as accurate as the brush, but the result is a loosening and transformation of the shape which ends with the birth of a sculpture.”