Adriana Mederos' Biography
Adriana Mederos has lived and worked in the United States since 1980 and has produced a diverse body of fine art paintings and, more recently, printmaking and a hybridization of the two mediums. Her artwork is in private collections and museums across the world; most recently her work has been purchased by local collectors from New Hampshire and Massachusetts and her work was selected for a permanent collection in the Penang State University Museum in Malaysia.
Mederos' earlier works focused on the figure and responded to current events in her homeland in an illustrative, graphic-style using mostly watercolor, inks and pencils. In her first forays into abstract paintings, she used primarily oil paint. Later, she began to move to acrylics from oil paints after developing sensitivities to the medium and the solvents. Working with acrylics has freed her working style allowing her to work more quickly and more instinctually, layer upon dry layer, as opposed to working on wet payers of paint.
Since 2007, she has concentrated on a large body of abstract work, both on canvas and on paper. In the years 2007-2008, she worked solely with painting and these works are infused with an energy and that seems in keeping with this Latina's personality.
Throughout 2008 and 2009, Mederos experimented with this new approach in large-scale paintings and in smaller-scale works on paper producing many beautiful works. During this time, she has also painted representational works that investigate folkloric archetypes, often superimposing Latin women features for those more commonly known or remembered.
These artworks have been created as works on paper from which greeting cards were developed. Gigi Mederos was also honored in 2009 as the Best Boston Latino Artist in the Plastic Arts division by the online readers of El Planeta news magazine.
After taking a series of printmaking workshops, she began incorporating polystyrene plate printing into her work as a way to quickly fracture the picture plane and to open the work to more possibilities. This break-through allowed Adriana to respond to the chance encounters each plate made with the painted surface of the canvas or paper itself. Using acrylic paints and water-based printmaking inks, she works abstractly on both paper and canvas. Often her underpaintings are the ground on which she prints. The initial paintings she does both peek through and are masked by the impressions she lays down.
From 2010 on into 2011, Gigi worked hard in the studio, producing varied works in many sizes and mediums. A prolific artist, Mederos continued to develop a mature body of work while still experimenting with alternative printmaking techniques.
Now in the summer of 2011, Adriana Mederos, along with her partner, Stevie Black, has opened a gallery of her work in the Rocky Neck Art Colony of Gloucester, MA.