Biography

Colombian painter and sculptress Elma Pignalosa graduated from the Sculpture School of Los Andes University in Santa Fe de Bogotá.

She received her Master of Fine Arts Degree from the Sculpture School of Fine Arts Academy of Rome.

Memberships:

Member of the Santa Andrea Art and Science Academy of Rome
since 1969
Member of the Royal Academy of Pontzen, Naples
since 1987.

She has had many collective and solo exhibitions in several cities all over the world, together with great master painters and sculptors, such as Rivera, Negret, Botero and Marina Nuñez del Prado among others. She has held more than two hundred exhibitions, deserving from the well-known italian art critic Attilio Freschi the following comment: "The Colombian painter and sculptress Elma Pignalosa is endowed with an exceptional creative imagination and expresses herself with equal assurance in both art fields".

Her work has included teaching and counseling to artists at her own studio, which has been managed and directed by Pignalosa for over 40 years.

Her paintings echo every aspect of her multifaceted history. A fusion between her past, present and future.

Currently lives and works between Boca Raton and Bogota studios and does her sculptures at the Miami studio "La Finca".

Intentional synthesis

Elma Pignalosa's tri dimensional works acquire once again a new dimension. Now the extensions of bright levels in bronze sheets attain larger spaces and the figures, basically silhouettes, are multiplied.

The smooth surface becomes a mirror contrasting with organic forms. They are mostly lonely figures, but some of them show family couples or trios. Here we notice the artist's intention of synthesizing and praising the human figure beyond its real limits.

This 2004 series celebrates 46 years of artistic life complemented by a series of schematic and expressionist designs.

Even if in the small and medium-sized sculptures Elma Pignalosa pursues to approach geometry, she adds to their shape the intention of changing the presence of daily violence into spiritual space forms, thus converting her romantic vision to a personal purpose.

The artist uses symbols and shapes as a reflection of her visual and artistic thoughts, summarized in her loose, sensual and free drawing lines.

The skyline doesn't exist, but in the attitude of the outlined bodies, the sculptress complements her own religious iconography with the presence of sinuous lines.

In some ways these figures mention the past, but also can represent futuristic bodies - a creative bridge established in her proposal since many years.

Maria Cristina Pignalosa
Bogota. July 28, 2005