Victoria Civera

Puerto de Sagunto (Valencia) 1955

By: Roberto Díaz

Victoria Civera studied Fine Arts at the San Carlos School of Valencia from 1972 to 1977. She then began to experiment with photography, photomontage and happenings, but it was in painting that she found her most common medium of expression. In the early 1980s, she first began including circles in her work, with figures trapped in spirals, rough and tarnished paintings fluctuating between certain neoexpressionist influences and abstract symbolism. In 1987, after moving to New York, she found her own language. Civera combines figuration and abstraction creating tensions between the natural-artificial and the functional-dreamlike, incorporating new materials such as cotton, linen, silk, velvet, wood and metals, objects that she used to expand her field of action to sculpture and installation in the 1990s. Her works have a strong anthropological charge, in the form of an essentialist feminism, where the depiction of women and the intimate and social or cultural spheres in which they operate play a key role, projecting her own vision of what it means to be female and thus her own fears, desires and memories.  

Victoria Civera began exhibiting in the 1980s and has taken part in important group exhibitions, including ‘Cocido y crudo’ [The Cooked and The Raw], at the Reina Sofía (Madrid, 1994); ‘Mudanzas’ [Moves], at the Whitechapel Art Gallery (London, 1994); ‘Human Nature’, at The New Museum of Contemporary Art (New York, 1995) and ‘Big Sur’, at the Hamburger Bahnhof (Berlin, 2002). She has staged solo shows at Palacete del Embarcadero (Santander, 1994); Le Quartier Centre d’Art Contemporain (Quimper, France, 2000); La Gallera (Valencia, 2000); Space 1 at the Reina Sofía (Madrid, 2005); Condes de Gabia  Palace Exhibition Centre (Granada, 2006); Malaga Contemporary Art Centre (2010 and 2015); and Valencia Institute of Modern Art (IVAM, Valencia, 2011). Her accolades include the 1993 Critical Eye Award for the Visual Arts, the Gold Medal of Merit in Fine Arts in 2014 and the Medal of the Polytechnic University of Valencia in 2017.