New Work | Rossella Matamoros | Paradojas Luminosas
Rossella Matamoros is a leading Latin American artist with a four-decade career built on serious engagement with the most urgent social questions.
She has exhibited at major institutions across Latin America, Europe and Asia, held a Japan Foundation Scholarship at Kyoto Seika University, a Fulbright at George Washington University, and won Costa Rica's Francisco Amighetti National Prize in 2020. She has also won the Costa Rican National Aquileo J. Echeverría Award twice, in 1998 and 2003. Also in 2003 she was invited to participate in the Venice Biennale with the installation My Heart of a Fortress City, and in 2017 she was invited back to the Venice Biennale to participate in collective performances with Jelily Aticu and Hanna Halprin.
We are very pleased to welcome her to MÍRAME, and to share new available paintings from her 2026 series Paradojas Luminosas.
Matamoros studied in Paris and Washington before a Japan Foundation Scholarship brought her to Kyoto Seika University in 1999, an encounter with Japanese performing arts that fundamentally changed her understanding of gesture and mark-making. That influence can be seen alongside Latin American primitivism in her work, producing paintings that function as formal experiments and political statements.
Her approach treats paint as a record of the body's passage through space — decisive strokes, recurring motifs, traces of movement. When we visited her at her studio in San José, she told us she views her shapes and forms like characters on the canvas. Her installations have tackled femicide, teenage pregnancy, immigration, climate change and LGBTQ rights, and her work has been declared of cultural interest by Costa Rica's Ministry of Culture.
Her solo exhibition history is impressive. Nationally, Matamoros has shown her work at the National Museum of Costa Rica, the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design in San José and the Calderón Guardia Museum, where she has returned repeatedly over the course of her career. Internationally, sside from participating twice at the Venice Biennale, she has shown at the Queens Museum and BAM Fisher Theater in New York, the La Neomudéjar Museum in Madrid, and won First Prize in Painting at the International Contemporary Art Biennial of Chapingo in Mexico in 2008.
In April 2026, Matamoros participates in La Palabra Expandida at the Palacio Quintanar de Segovia, Spain, curated by Margarita Aizpuru — one of the founders of ARCO Madrid and a defining figure in the Spanish contemporary art world. This exhibition positions Matamoros as an internationally active Latin American artist working today, alongside Esther Ferrer, the pioneering Spanish performance artist and Premio Nacional de Artes Plásticas laureate, and Beth Moyses, the Brazilian artist known for her feminist performance practice.
Paradojas Luminosas
Paradojas Luminosas — Luminous Paradoxes — explores the energy created from tension between darkness and light. The paradox at the heart of the series is that something small and luminous can anchor a composition built on chaos. The paintings are powerful, large-scale pieces with energy and movement that seems to burst out of the surface. It feels like the forms cannot be contained within the boundaries of the canvas.
El Reto (The Challenge) features a deep orange and amber ground where black ink explodes outward from the centre. At the heart of the dark mass, a white spiral form holds its place. The expressive orange abstraction has considerable energy, the warmth of the palette intensifying the sense of something volatile held momentarily in balance.
Rossella Matamoros, El Reto
¡La Luz Gana! (Light Wins) feels more restrained despite the explosive mark-making. An incomplete golden circle sits at the centre of a burst of black and grey — paint flung, splattered and dragged across the canvas in every direction. The circle holds its ground. There is something almost defiant about it, a single unbroken gesture of gold light against the surrounding chaos.
La Naturaleza Gana (Nature Wins) takes the same compositional logic further. The central form here is a vivid collaged sphere — green, orange, alive with colour — positioned at the heart of a similar explosion of black and grey. It reads almost like a planet, or a cell, something fundamental and organic at the centre of a storm. The collage element adds a different texture to the surface, and the contrast between the splattered painted ground and the contained, luminous centre gives the painting a particular intensity.
Rossella Matamoros, La Naturaleza Gana
The Paradojas Luminosas series features bold, confrontational and carefully considered paintings — and they are visually spectacular. Matamoros is a Latin American artist whose reputation has grown steadily over four decades and continues to do so. For collectors looking for work with both presence and substance, Matamoros is one of the most significant Latin American artists available through MÍRAME.
Four paintings from the Paradojas Luminosas series are available to view and buy through MÍRAME. To enquire, contact Belinda at [email protected]
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