Mara De Luca is a Los Angeles-based artist. De Luca’s recent work is a reflection on contemporary mass media expressed though the diverse pictorial, conceptual and technical conventions of abstract and representational painting. Recent exhibitions have included CERCA Series: Mara De Luca at the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego in March 2010.

Mara De Luca received a BA in Visual Arts at Columbia University in 1995 and her MFA at CalArts in 2004. She has taught Painting and Drawing at institutions including UC Riverside and UC San Diego. From 1998 to 2003, she lived and worked abroad in Berlin, Germany. Her work has been exhibited in the U.S. and Europe at venues including Galerie Chromosome Berlin, AbstruseSpace London, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions and at the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego. She has received critical press in publications including the Los Angeles Times, Time Out London and Tip Berlin. De Luca has recently been the recipient of a Durfee Foundation Artist’s Resource for Completion Grant.

General Artist's Statement
2011

My practice 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. 

A mirroring between process and representation is a central aspect to my work, whereby what is being represented and the means by which it is being represented share conceptual significance; the representation thus serves as a model for its critical content.  Often, in developing process-content relationships, I invent new ways of "making" paintings; as a result, my projects display diverse aesthetics rather than a coherent "style".  In recent projects, I have employed a strategy of systematic processes to achieve painterly effects; the generated representations are a critical gesture voiced through the radical language of abstraction.  In other work, I have implemented "expressive" or gestural, hand-made approaches as a means of investigating the opposite- the impersonal and pervasive realm of digital advertisement and media.