28/10/2026
IN FOCUS | LUNA PAIVA
Luna Paiva is a Franco-Argentine visual artist based in Barcelona whose practice moves between material culture, memory and the transformation of the familiar. UNEARTHED, her first solo exhibition with ST VINCENTS, opens Thursday, 5 November.
Raised between Paris and Buenos Aires, Paiva grew up immersed in art and cultural heritage. Her mother, Teresa Anchorena, was an influential figure in Argentina’s cultural life, while her father, the artist and photographer Roland Paiva, introduced her to drawing and photography at an early age. Together with her Guaraní, Spanish, Scottish and Polish roots, this environment fostered a lasting curiosity about civilizations and their material histories, which she pursued through Art History and Archaeology at La Sorbonne and later film at NYU. Paiva began her career in film stills and editorial photography before making sculpture central to her practice, retaining her attention to subject, framing and context.
Her practice considers the cultural life of ordinary things and the conventions through which we assign them meaning and value. Objects such as a plastic chair, an ornamental plant or a stone, made almost invisible by familiarity, are isolated, recast in bronze and sometimes assembled into totemic forms. Their identities remain recognisable, yet they acquire a different cultural standing, somewhere between the everyday object and the artefact. Context itself becomes a material of transformation.
In more recent work, this enquiry extends to the materials themselves. Coloured pencil, paper, ceramic and terrazzo, modest by reputation, are given a scale and attention more often associated with nobler means. Memories, gestures and lived experiences find material expression in these works.
Paiva has exhibited across Latin America, Europe and the United States, including the 2024 Havana Biennial. She has created permanent public sculptures in Spain, Argentina, Morocco and Cuba, and her work is held in the collection of the Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires.
Private Preview
Thursday 29 October, 6–9 PM
By invitation or RSVP: [email protected]
Photography: Gregori Civera
Link in bio
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