Genevieve Maquinay

Geneviève Maquinay Déséglise is a Colombian-Belgian painter and sculptor. She started studying Fine Arts in Colombia and then moved to Brussels for eight years, where she completed her studies in painting and sculpture and graduated from the National College of Visual Arts La Cambre with Honors. She complimented her formation by studying photo engraving in Italy.

With strong care for the environment, she likes to work with recycled materials: pieces of wood, stones, strings and textile, glass and scraps of metal, etc. These are testaments of places that are meaningful to her and vestiges, memories of time past. She has exhibited her art on many occasions in New York, Paris, Brussels and Bogotá among others. In a recent exhibition at the United Nations in NY, she displayed pieces exploring the intimate relationship between memory and recycling. She was invited last July to an artist residence in Catuçaba, Brazil, where she constructed three pieces using on-site recyclable materials, including one in collaboration with Ramon Moreno. She made a point of using discarded wood from the Mata Atlantica to build her pieces.

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Geneviève is also deeply committed to humanitarian actions. She is the President and co-Founder of the foundation Caring for Colombia, which promotes initiatives focused on health, education, art and creativity in order to build a more peaceful society in Colombia. Painter Jaime Castellanos describes her works with the following words: "An itinerary is weaved by the point and counterpoint of sensitive reasoning and spaces previously meditated and allows surprising mental associations to ensue. First comes an identification of natural or urban elements, followed by a careful layout and installation in the workshop. The result is a confrontation, assemblage or composition of units or objects endowed with a powerful unity and poetic quality."