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ABOUT
TERESA OAXACA
Painter | Arlington, Virginia / Washington, DC
BIOGRAPHY
Teresa Oaxaca is an American painter based in Arlington, Virginia, in the Washington, DC area. Working primarily in oil, she creates elaborate figurative paintings, still lifes, and imagined environments populated by figures, flowers, animals, porcelain, costumes, masks, toys, and collected objects.
Oaxaca’s work draws upon the visual language of European painting while constructing a distinctly contemporary and personal world. Her paintings have been exhibited throughout the United States and internationally, including at the American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center in Washington, DC; Museo Villa Bardini in Florence; the Museu Europeu d’Art Modern in Barcelona; the Mall Galleries in London; the Autry National Center in Los Angeles; and galleries and institutions throughout the United States.
Her work has received recognition from the Portrait Society of America, the Art Renewal Center, and the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation. Oaxaca maintains an active studio practice in Arlington and also teaches painting and drawing through museums, art schools, and independent workshops.
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ARTIST STATEMENT
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My paintings inhabit a world of figures, flowers, animals, toys, porcelain, costume, and collected objects, suspended somewhere between portraiture, still life, landscape, allegory, and dream.
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I am drawn to beauty when it becomes excessive, theatrical, strange, or unstable. Flowers bloom at the edge of decay. Animals and figures emerge from ornamental environments. Porcelain, shells, masks, ribbons, fabric, and cultivated nature accumulate until familiar things begin to acquire an uncertain symbolic life.
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The paintings often begin in observation. I work from models, objects, plants, animals, landscape, and elaborate arrangements in the studio, but the image gradually departs from its source. Scale shifts. Separate genres begin to overlap. Something initially observed becomes invented.
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My training is rooted in the traditions of European figurative painting, but I do not use that language to reconstruct the past. I am interested instead in its persistence within contemporary life: how historical images, cultivated nature, memory, mortality, beauty, and human invention continue to coexist.
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Increasingly, my work considers man’s timeless presence in nature: not humanity separated from the natural world, but moving through it, collecting it, cultivating it, representing it, mythologizing it, and being returned to it.
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SELECTED HIGHLIGHTS
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Based: Arlington, Virginia / Washington, DC
Medium: Oil painting and drawing
Selected exhibitions: American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center; Museo Villa Bardini, Florence; Museu Europeu d’Art Modern, Barcelona; Mall Galleries, London; Autry National Center, Los Angeles
Selected honors: Portrait Society of America; Art Renewal Center; Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation
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