"Pandora Box" Painting

About My Work – Maria Lago
My journey as an artist spans more than four decades, across countries,
techniques, and stages of life. I was born in Asturias, in northern Spain,
not far from the Paleolithic caves that shaped my early imagination.
From a young age, I felt a deep pull toward the symbolic, the sacred, and
the primal act of creating. That connection has stayed with me ever
since.
My work is tactile. I work with natural materials, burlap, clay, cement,
pigment, paper, layering, stitching, and embedding them into surfaces
that feel both personal and universal. Often, I incorporate fragments of
older paintings into new pieces. This process of reusing and
transforming speaks to the cycles I observe in nature and in myself. It’s
like a kind of archaeology, digging through time, assembling memory
into form.
I often return to a language of symbols, circles, molecular structures, and
gestural marks. These forms come from somewhere beyond words. They
belong to a space between the body and the cosmos, between history and
presence. My work is deeply influenced by abstract expressionism, but
also by ancient traditions of mark-making. It is both urban and timeless.
In a world of accelerating digital images and artificial intelligence, I feel
a responsibility to return to the hand, the gesture, the mystery that lies in
organic materials. I believe that art still has the power to connect us
across cultures and generations, to speak to something older and deeper
within us all.
Over the years, I’ve been fortunate to show my work across Europe and
the U.S. My pieces live in private and institutional collections in Spain,
Mexico, England, and the U.S. But for me, what matters most is the
connection created when someone stands in front of my work and feels
something beyond words.