Mara De Luca

Born in 1973, Mara De Luca lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. De Luca’s paintings evoke a sense of atmospheric abstractions that bring to mind dusk, sunsets, and planetary orbs. Throughout her work there is a sense of reflected ambient light.

De Luca received an MFA from CalArts, Los Angeles, CA and a BA from Columbia University, NY. Her work has been displayed at the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego and is in prominent collections, including the Buck Collection at UC Irvine, Alexander Plaza Berlin, Germany; New York Medical College, New York; and the University of Oslo, Norway. She has been reviewed in Artforum, Cultured Magazine, The Los Angeles Times, Artweek LA, and others. De Luca is a recipient of the 2019 California Community Foundation Fellowship for Visual Artists.

MARA DE LUCA’S art practice fuses together disparate ideas like the glossy advertising of high fashion brands and an expressionistic painting technique filtered through the gauze of her life in Los Angeles. De Luca uses color and texture to evoke memories of a place; dusk monochromes, nighttime clouds and glowing sunsets are a direct response to the beauty of the Southern California landscape, whereas stoic colors and metallic frames glamorize the bleakness of the industrial Southland freeways. Often referencing literature and poetry, she allows her experience of these diverse elements to inform her work. De Luca has had solo exhibitions at the Irvine Fine Arts Center and the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego.

“My work is a reflection on contemporary culture expressed though a diverse, project-driven and contextual approach to painting. Whether through an exploration of clichéd modernist technique such as ‘action painting’ or by way of mimicking contemporary digital imaging tropes, I employ and exploit the complex range of the medium's history, its diverse visual contexts, theoretical constructs as well as material, process and craft.” –De Luca

Submitted by Quint Gallery