Kenia Almaraz Murillo

Kenia Almaraz Murillo (b.1994, Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia) makes contemporary wall-mounted sculptures that integrate weavings in indigenous South American yarns with recycled urban objects – car bumpers and lit motorbike headlamps – salvaged from Parisian scrap yards. These are frequently combined with embroidered panels taken from Bolivian carnival costumes as well as with ritual items such as small bags of corn, pretend money, quinoa and protective amulets. In a seamless fusion of the natural and artificial, Kenia weaves neon LED light into the midst of these sculptural offerings to skilfully explore themes such as familial legacy, diasporic identity and Andean cosmovision. 

These unusual material encounters are visual narratives of centuries-old beliefs and customs that assert a sacred relationship between humankind and Mother Earth, the bedrock of Andean cosmovision. The colourful beings that populate pre-Columbian folk tales – serpents, bears, scorpions, ants, lizards, frogs, llamas, eagles and gods – weave their path into Kenia’s sculptures; with lights and metallic remnants as eyes, these spirit creatures have strong agency and mesmerising gaze. A descendant of indigenous Andean weavers and mystics, and a fervent believer in shamanism as an ancestrally inherited practice, Kenia also draws inspiration from her dreams. Diarising them each morning, she transcribes the vivid, symbol-laden world of her personal mythology into the rich tapestry of her sculptures. 

For Kenia, Bolivian folk tales and her shamanic connection with ancestral and familial legacies are things she holds dear, talismans in lonely years after moving with her older sister from Bolivia to Paris at the age of 11. In Paris, Kenia showed early creative aptitude, studying art at Paris 8 University (2012–2013), then at Paris 1 University (2013–2015) and finally at the prestigious École des Beaux-Arts de Paris (2015–2020), from which she graduated with distinction. In parallel with this extensive tuition, from 2015 to 2020 Kenia learned basse-lisse weaving under the mentorship of legendary French textile artist Simone Prouvé (b.1931).  This Parisian education informs Kenia’s work with the philosophical and cultural contexts of the Western aesthetic tradition; blended with Andean cosmology, Kenia and her artistic practice embody a true diasporic identity.

In addition to her sculptural practice, Kenia channels her South American heritage in paintings that adopt the stripes and geometric shapes of neo-Andean architecture and traditional woven cloth. Her striated canvases and the enormous graphic murals in Paris and Santa Cruz de la Sierra that she paints in collaboration with artist Elliott Causse pay homage to the vibrantly painted buildings of Kenia’s homeland. Geometry also appears in Kenia’s sculptures, in the threads screen printed with graphic patterns stretched between wooden bars and, of course, in the grid structure of her weavings.

In 2021, Kenia joined the traditional Bolivian dance ensemble Caporales, based in Paris. This ensemble is a branch of Oruro Carnival, one of the world’s largest folk dance carnivals, distinguished as a core cultural heritage practice by UNESCO. Kenia also dances with the Mi Viejo San Simon group, which performs across Europe. For Kenia, the synchronised movements and deeply symbolic costumes of Bolivian dancing make it a demanding spiritual and metaphysical experience akin to a pilgrimage.

Kenia has enjoyed frequent solo exhibitions, including ‘Tissages Lumières’, at La Manufacture de Roubaix, France (2024); ‘Invitation to a Mystical Dreamland’, Custot Gallery, Dubai (2024); ‘Les Esprits de la Plaine’, Galerie Anne-Sarah Bénichou, Paris (2023); and ‘Le Temps de l’Éclipse’, Galerie Boulakia, London (2022). Recent group shows include ‘Entre Leurs Doigts’, Pavillon Vendôme, Clichy (2024); ‘Sur le Fil: de Dakar à Paris’, le 19M, Paris (2023); ‘Material Journey’, Custot Gallery, Dubai (2022); and ‘Les Métamorphoses’, Musée des Arts et Métiers, Paris (2022). Notable collaborative public installations include ‘Prismes’ at the Chapelle des Petits-Augustins, Paris (2017), while permanent murals made with Elliott Causse include ‘Glyphes’ at the Cinema Le Grand Rex (2024); ‘Abysses’, at UGC Issy-les-Moulineaux, Paris (2022) and ‘Signaux’ at the Altarea Group, Paris (2020). In 2023, Kenia was awarded the Emerige-CPGA Prize organised by Comité Professionnel des Galeries d’Art and the Fonds de Dotation Emerige, which rewards a significant work by a French artist exhibited at Arco Madrid. Kenia works from a studio in the innovative Parisian creative hub POUSH.

Kenia Almaraz Murillo is represented worldwide by Waddington Custot.