CECILIA PAREDES – A Circular Flight

The city of Tuttlingen is presenting the internationally renowned artist Cecilia Paredes, who was born in Peru, for the first time in Germany. Paredes is known for her extraordinary photographic self-portraits. These works explore migration and home, nature and civilization, as well as a collective poetics. Paredes powerfully combines photographic and performative works, drawing from many sources, including formative childhood experiences, Peruvian colonial history, and a deep-seated reverence for nature. An extended stay in Costa Rica in the late 1990s reaffirmed Paredes’ passion for landscape, mythology, cosmology, literature, and anthropology, which continues to this day. For her performative photos “Animal of my time,” the artist undergoes a transformation and becomes an animal herself. “My relationship with nature is based on admiration and love and is of fundamental importance to my life and work. The better you know animals and plants, the more you respect them. I want to build an intimate connection with them: I study and imitate them.” Paredes’ series “Landscapes” will also be on view. For these images, she painted her body in such a way that it blends into artistically patterned, floral backgrounds so seamlessly that the viewer can barely discern where it begins and where it ends. In these photographs, the artist explores the complexity of migration, in which an individual exists in a new place yet is not fully perceived. Another body of work is dedicated to the theme of flight, a subject Cecilia Paredes has explored since the beginning of her artistic career. For the artist, the use of feathers or wings is symbolically linked to rebellion and freedom. She also draws on cultural history: the motif of the feather has held significant meaning across eras in her home country of Peru. Cecilia Paredes (b. 1950), who resides in Philadelphia, USA, studied at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru in Lima, the Cambridge School of Art in England, and the Scuola Libera del Nudo at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome. She has an extensive track record of international exhibitions and was represented in the Latin American Pavilion at the 51st Venice Biennale in 2005.