As part of the programming for Accretion: Works by Latin American Women, exhibiting artist Patricia Iglesias Peco will join exhibition curator Lauren Karazija in conversation to discuss her philosophy and art practice. Peco’s large-scale paintings burst with color, imagining wild, natural scenes occupied by flowers, bugs and animals. In her dreamlike expressions, gargantuan flowers are neither languid nor gentle but monster-like, as terrifying as they are beautiful. Beneath their material condition, buttressed are ideas drawn from a variety of sources—personal experience, of course, but also psychoanalytical texts, poetry, art history. As of late, the artist has been occupied by the vast work of Uruguayan author and poet Marosa di Giorgio (1932-2004), much of which is only available in her native Spanish. Like di Giorgio, Peco fearlessly offers confessions from the bodies of women, not limited to sexuality but exploring a myriad of experiences—menstruation, aging, gender and power, violence, romance, friendship. These confessions present an explosive eruption of stories long silenced, suppressed, sublimated.

Patricia Iglesias Peco was born and raised in Buenos Aires, Argentina. After apprenticeships with Pablo Edelstein and Philip Pavia, in Argentina and Italy respectively, she moved to the United States to study first at the Savannah College of Art and Design and subsequently at the School of Visual Arts in New York. She currently lives and works in Los Angeles.