Renée Abaroa Mexico, b. 1998

Renée Abaroa (b. 1998, Mexico) expresses her ideas and memories through illustration, painting, embroidery, video and sound. Drawing from personal experience and emotional resonance, her practice distills symbolic weight through the quiet poetry of everyday life. Based between Guadalajara and rural South Korea, and shaped by residencies in Japan, Iceland, and Australia, Abaroa is deeply attuned to her environments, both physical and emotional, allowing her surroundings to inform and inspire her work.

At the heart of her practice lies a sensitivity to the materials of daily life. In some series, she draws directly from familial memory of relatives that she wishes to preserve their memories - both transforming receipts, favourite menus, handwritten notes, and shared ideologies into embroidered textiles, sculpture, and installation. Her painted miniatures (sometimes no larger than a few centimetres) invite slow, attentive looking, conjuring entire inner worlds through scale, colour and suggestion. Whether in thread, pigment, or sound, Abaroa’s work celebrates the small, the strange, and the beautifully unresolved.

Abaroa has participated in artist residencies across Mexico, Iceland, and Japan, and has exhibited internationally in Mexico, Italy, Iceland, Canada, Austria, Japan, Portugal, and South Korea. Her recent solo presentation It’s Half Past Six at Tenjinyama Art Studio (Sapporo, Japan, 2024) combined musical reference, embroidered narrative, and cross-media installation to build a dreamlike, emotionally charged visual world. She studied Visual Arts at ESARQ in Guadalajara, and before that illustration at NABA in Milan.