Silvia Wagensberg

Artist Statement

My practice explores questions of identity shaped by gender, race, migration, and social experience within both public and private spaces. Originally from Barcelona and trained as a painter, I work across a range of traditional media.
Portraiture has long been central to my work. I am drawn to painting the communities I belong to because I believe that understanding others allows for a deeper understanding of oneself and the world. Over the years, I have created figurative portraits of elderly women in my family, contemporary Yiddish speakers, artists, curators, gallery owners, and teachers from the local Venice High School, where I dedicated fifteen years of work. These paintings explore personal and collective memory while tracing connections between ancestry, place, diaspora, and my multiple identities in the United States.
Language also plays a fundamental role in my practice. Raised in Barcelona in a family of immigrants, I grew up hearing Yiddish spoken between my parents, though the language was never passed on to my generation. In 1987, following a personal tragedy, I immigrated to the United States with my twelve-year-old daughter and settled in Los Angeles. Since then, themes of diaspora, translation, cultural preservation, and belonging have continued to shape my work.
As a bilingual and bicultural artist, I see a close relationship between painting and language. Trying to speak a language is not so different from making a brushstroke: both are familiar yet never repeated in exactly the same way. Like spoken language, brushwork can be both standardized and deeply personal. Many of my sitters belong to communities attempting to sustain a culture, a language, or a shared memory threatened by disappearance.
My work often combines lived experience with surrealism, transforming observed scenes into symbolic narratives that explore our shared human condition. I continue to develop my practice through close observation of everyday life and active engagement with the Los Angeles art community.
My work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions at venues including the National Steinbeck Center, The Ebell of Los Angeles, the Heller Museum, Range Projects, Hillel UCLA, Loyola Marymount University and recently part of Perceive Me with Kristine Schomaker. My paintings have also appeared regularly in Maintenant, the Dada journal published by Three Rooms Press, N.Y.