isabel miramontes

Miramontes was born in Santiago de Compostella (Spain).
This eminent place of pilgrimage, which is of Celtic origin, still fascinates her and remains for her a magical area.
But it was in Belgium, in Brussels, that the artist grew up and did her studies, obtaining a teaching diploma in Fine Arts at the Institut Sainte Marie.
She continued her training at the Fine Arts Academy of Saint-Gilles, in Patrick Pouillart's studio, where she acquired a solid experience of drawing and sketching from live models. She retained from this experience the need to fix at any moment the human body's movements, poses and impressions, jotting them down in numerous sketchpads. These are the many testimonies of the subtle and discerning eye she casts around her.
She also followed the courses of the art historian Gastón Fernandez, who marked her artistic, rigorous yet generous reflection, always enlivened by an expansive open-mindedness.
It was in a sculptor friend’s studio, that she made her passionate discovery of sculpture. This became her preferred mode of expression, to which she has devoted herself ever since.
Every day, Isabel Miramontes shuts herself up in her studio. There, echoing her sketches, she fervently fashions the clay, explores new shapes to give body to her interior life and convey her vision of the world. Struck by a silhouette, a movement, a symbol, a thought, Isabel Miramontes translates the human pose with profound and sincere emotion.
The visual language of Isabel Miramontes steadfastly represents the human being in all the ambiguity of its power and frailty, its confinement and yearning for liberty, its dreams and triumphs. This fascinating figure, the synthesis of forms and thoughts, expresses the reality of life with its moments of joy, but also drama, abandon and tension. Indeed a figure who most assuredly speaks to everyone at the very depth of their being.
"The eye of Isabel Miramontes, accustomed to art, calms life's gestures and torments. She reinvents them unhesitatingly in her artist's universe.
Man and medium intermingle, disintegrate and reinvent themselves in new matter. Matter reduced to the essential that gently transforms itself into emotions and forgotten sensations, the supreme value of its destiny.
Discernible on their faces and gleaming the length of their limbs, the fineness of her sculptures aspires to freedom and imprints itself for ever on our minds."
F. Abi Khalil