Mariel Castellanos

Mariel Castellanos Sánchez focuses on the human figure—in all states of motion and rest, isolated and in groups, nude, clothed, male, female, and transgendered. With careful attention to the physicality of the body and the expressive range of its gestures and motions, she paints precise, delicately rendered people on wooden cutouts, which she affixes to walls in exuberant groupings. Her works range from tender, personal portraits to edgy and imaginative scenarios. In Juana E Isabella (2013), for example, Castellanos Sánchez pictures two sweet-faced little girls at a table, while in ABCDEFG HIJKLMN OPQRST UVWXYZ (2013), she constructs the entire English alphabet out of a repeating, fishnet stocking- and bustier-clad transvestite figure, whose variously spread limbs and bent, arching body form the shape of each letter, and call into question the boundary between masculinity and femininity.