Karian Amaya

Karian Amaya (Chihuahua - Mexico, 1986) lives and works in Guadalajara.

She holds a degree in visual arts from the University of Guadalajara and studied at the Art Students League in New York. Karian also had a residency in 2022 at the famous Casa Wabi, designed by Tadao Ando and founded by one of the greatest contemporary Mexican artist, Bosco Sodi.

Karian Amaya's artistic practice revolves around the notion of encounter. Through sculpture and photography, the artist questions the dialogues and resistances that originate between matter, the landscape, and their social and territorial contexts.

Deeply influenced by the land art and post-minimal movements, her work is rooted in the formal and narrative encounter of raw, natural, and industrial materials.

Amaya is the daughter of a copper miner ; in her creations, she explores her interest in pointing out the extractive of natural minerals and the fragility they contain over time.

As a sculptor, she frequently uses the circular shape, which has been a key symbol for many centuries in both aesthetic and philosophical cultures in North and South America. As an example, Karian Amaya is citing the great author Jorge Luis Borges as a major source of inspiration and directly used the name of one of his novels ("The Circular Ruins") for an eponymous sculpture series she created.