Karla Herencia has new work available through MÍRAME, and we are very glad to be sharing it — a two-metre oil on canvas and a series of works on paper, Costa Rican coastal art that emerged from a deeply personal place: absence, loss and the disappearing species of the country's coastline.
Read on for our thoughts on both.
Pasaje Líquido / Liquid Passage (oil on canvas, 2025, 200 × 130 cm, 78.7 × 51.2 in.) is a single wave filling the full height of the canvas — rich teal, darkening towards black at its core, cresting in white foam at the top. At two metres tall, it is a substantial painting; the wave has a life of its own.
Herencia is clear however that this painting is not a seascape. "The wave that appears here is not decoration or landscape," she tells us. "It is a tunnel, a threshold, a liquid passage between states of being." The work emerged from a period of serious contemplation about life, death and existence — thought through, as so much of her practice is, from a life spent alongside Costa Rica's ocean. The colour, she notes, found her; it came to her organically: she tells us it is the colour of what is alive and, at the same time, the colour of mystery.
Karla Herencia, Pasaje Líquido
Herencia is influenced by a long cultural memory — the idea, held across many ancient coastal cultures, that the sea connects worlds, rather than separates them. The wave is a threshold, a body with its own presence, a passage between states that language struggles to name. "This wave is enormous," she writes, "because so is what we do not know."
The painting also connects directly to her broader practice, which has been built around the coastlines of Costa Rica — collecting discarded plastic fragments from the beach, transforming industrial debris into sculpture and installation, interrogating the relationship between human activity and natural ecosystems. Her participation in the 2024 Tijuana Triennial brought that practice to an international audience, placing her within a wider conversation about environmental crisis and contemporary art, and establishing her as a significant voice in Costa Rican coastal art and in the wider Latin American environmental tradition.
Pasaje Líquido is a departure within Herencia's practice — more inward, more elemental than her installation and sculpture work. It is a painting about what the sea holds, rather than what we have done to it.
Karla Herencia and Costa Rican Coastal Art
Karla Herenica, from the El silencio tiene formas series
From the series: El silencio tiene formas / Silence Has Forms
The Costa Rican coast is Herencia's inspiration, but it is also her material, her archive, her frame of reference, and increasingly, her way of bearing witness to what is disappearing from it, and from herself.
The series El silencio tiene formas is comprised of acrylic works on 300g acid-free paper — stark black grounds with white organic forms: a crab, starfish, sand dollar, coral, shells depicted as two-dimensional silhouettes, outlined in grey.
Herencia describes the series as having emerged from a personal process of grief, but also from the discovery of a love that survives loss. The works address memory, space, void, and silence.
She tells us: "It is also my way of honoring those I have lost sight of: people and species who, paradoxically, are still present — even when they can no longer be seen. Like the crab, which has been disappearing from the coastal environment I inhabit — a place in Costa Rica, one known and celebrated worldwide for its exuberant nature."
The white forms feel different once you know that: less like illustrations of what is there and more like records of what is leaving. The title says it plainly: silence, in these works, is not empty. It has edges, outlines and a body.
"The white space is the paper breathing," she writes. "Void is form and form is void."
These paintings are the beginning of a larger Costa Rican coastal art series Herencia is continuing to work on, exploring how absence and memory can teach us new ways of inhabiting the world.
Karla Herenica, from the El silencio tiene formas series
Several works from the series are available through MÍRAME now, alongside the immense wave painting Pasaje Líquido.
Please contact us to enquire or visit Karla Herencia's artist page on the MÍRAME website.
MÍRAME Contact Information:
Belinda Seppings
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