Cristina Lucas obtained a degree in Fine Arts at the Complutense University in Madrid (1998) and a Master's Degree at the University of California in Irvine (2000). From the outset, she has worked in performative art. However she tends to eschew stage appearances and rather records her actions in the form of photos and videos. She works in installations, drawing, animation, painting, photography and performance art, depending on what she has to say on each occasion, though these areas tend to overlap with action art, which is her most characteristic genre.

She reflects in an essentially critical fashion on images and established icons of renowned, mythical importance and on concepts that can be seen as assumptions. She seeks to help end structural inequalities, and the patriarchy is a major bone of contention for her (if not the only one). She holds an active political opinion on the role of art, though she does not deny its poetic side. She applies her subtle sense of humour to elements that go beyond rhetoric. Like Ortega y Gasset, she defends the idea that human beings do not have a nature but a history. Accordingly, she analyses the birth of the idea of the state and of citizens, and the point at which they turned into consumers; she looks at citizenship and wonders whether there is any such thing; at the current role of the church, etc. In this she sometimes uses animated maps that give her works an undeniable educational value, as in the case of Pantone (from -500 to 2007) (2007). This sense of incorporating the viewer becomes stronger when people from a particular context take part in her actions and take them on as their own, carrying out symbolic, cathartic, collective acts as in the videos Rousseau and Sophie (2007) and Touch and Go (2012).

Solo exhibitions of her work have been staged at the Stedelijk Museum Schiedam (the Netherlands, 2005), the Dos de Mayo Art Centre (Móstoles, Madrid, 2009), the Carrillo Gil Museum (Mexico City, 2010), the Kunstraum Innsbruck (Austria, 2014), the Centre for Contemporary Art of Galicia (Santiago de Compostela, 2014) and the Santa Mónica Art Centre (Barcelona, 2015). She won the Ojo Crítico ['Critical Eye'] Award for Plastic Arts in 2009 and the Women in Visual Arts award in 2014.

Isabel Tejeda