Claudia Bitrán

About the Show Artists Installation Views

Claudia Bitrán (b. 1986), a multimedia artist from Chile, works primarily in painting and video, frequently using DIY aesthetics to represent the hyperbolic worlds of social media and pop culture. The artist employs a wide range of painting strategies to metamorphosize her source material, resulting in dense and thick surfaces that transform the content of the artist’s research. She holds an MFA in Painting from Rhode Island School of Design (2013), a BFA from the Universidad Catolica de Chile (2009) and was recently an artist-in-residence at Pioneer Works, New York. Bitrán currently lives and works in Brooklyn, teaching painting at Pratt Institute and Sarah Lawrence College, and is a guest critic at SIA in Beijing.

Works 

You Have to be Continually Drunk 

Claudia Bitrán, You Have To Be Continually Drunk, 10in x 11in, Acrylic on canvas, 2020

 As You Wish

Claudia Bitrán, As You Wish, 10in x 11in, Acrylic on canvas, 2020

On Wine

Claudia Bitrán, On Wine, 10in x 11in, Acrylic on canvas, 2020

Ask What Time It Is

Claudia Bitrán, Ask What Time It Is, 10in x 11in, Acrylic on canvas, 2020

The title of Bitrán’s Be Drunk series is borrowed from a Charles Baudelaire poem of the same name: urging the reader to “always be drunk… so as not to feel the horrible burden of time.” The four works selected from Bitrán’s 31 painting series explore the tension between the artist’s lack of control over the passage of time, and the desire to release the burden of bodily autonomy through inebriation. Through tumbling limbs and obscured faces, time is frozen and accelerated, simultaneously alleviating and emphasizing time’s burden.

 Animation

Movement in Bitrán’s paintings is actualized as she paints over the same image to “move” the inebriated characters in stop-motion-esque animation. The animations resemble GIFs in the way they loop before moving to the next scene, bridging internet culture and the bodily experience of drunkenness.