The Story of Her: With Shirley Villavicencio Pizango
Shirley Villavicencio Pizango is a Belgium-based artist with deep Peruvian roots who beautifully blends moments of her childhood in the Amazon rainforest, her days living in Lima and her current life in Belgium. Using vibrant acrylics and mixed media, she builds upon an intimate story of her travels, her culture, and her family, simultaneously using her point of view as a young female artist standing up for the repression of women depicted throughout Western art through her abstract figurative language and unconventional perspectives.
Tell us a little about you, your life, and how you got to where you are today.
“My name is Shirley Villavicencio Pizango, I was born in Peru and grew up between Lima, the capital, and Santiago de Borja, a small village in the Peruvian Amazone where my mother’s family lives. I moved to Belgium 15 years ago to study fine art, and after I finished my masters I participated in the HISK program. I began working with a Belgian gallery, and soon after with one in Los Angeles (Steve Turner). This August 3rd I have a solo exhibition in Los Angeles ‘Under One Sky’!”
Take us into your studio space– what does your creating space mean to you?
“It’s located in the center of Ghent, in a beguinage. My studio is like a small museum, and I like to collect things that are special to me. It can be a stone, or a typical object from a certain place I visited. I like ceramics and african masks, so I collect them too. For me the most beautiful materials are the ones you find from nature. So I have furniture made from bamboo, amongst other natural materials. I also love to collect artists’ books and other different sorts of papers. It’s a bit chaotic sometimes with all the canvases and the paint materials.”
Why do you do what you do– what does being an artist mean to you?
“First of all because I really love to paint– It’s really my passion. It’s a form of expressing myself. As an artist we have a lot of power, we can really raise our voice through art. We can transform words in images, sculpture, installation and other forms of art. Everything happens naturally.”
What are some of your favorite projects you’ve worked on to date?
“ All my exhibitions have been very special for me, but the ones I canmentione are:
‘A tear for power’ installation for HISK: this exhibition depicts how narcissism reveals itself in society, in the image of a woman assuming the position of an alpha men.
‘Unfinished Poetry’, a solo exhibition about my half brother, beside the fact that he’s black, he also has ausistic– things that are often judged within society. By making portraits of him I tried to break the idea that only white, powerful people can be immortalized on a canvas.”
What are some things you’d like for people to understand about what you paint?
“The layering in my paintings, people sometimes are misled by the vivid colors, assuming that’s a ‘happy painting’ while in reality I try to address important political themes from society like the struggles of being non-white or even being a woman. Themes not a lot of people like to talk about, like melancholy or even feeling lonely. My work is non realistic but figurative, I like to keep the nativity and spontaneity of it. That’s why I work with acrylic paint.”
Are there any different thoughts you’ve been having when it comes to creating future projects?
“Yes, I really want to experiment more with ceramics and installations. It’s such a delicate and strong material at the same time. I would like to travel and discover new places with their cultures– I like to be a local in every country I visit. I don’t like the feeling of being a tourist. I also want to maybe one day show the things I write, like poetry. The theme that fascinated me the last time was motherhood, so I plan doing something around that.”
Where do you see yourself in the next 5 years?
“I see myself having a solo exhibition in a museum and traveling around the world in search of more inspiration. I see myself having a super big studio where I am able to experiment with every material until the sun goes down.”
