Maria Mijares

I am a contemporary realist painter working in Florida, known
 for conceptually ‘lived-out ‘ stories relayed in ‘psychedelic precision’ and public art.

My work as a contemporary realist began with an unconscious intent to understand and hold onto personal experience. Born in NYC, I grew up back and forth between urban New Jersey and my ancestral Santander, Spain. Comfortably lost everywhere, I developed a heightened visual awareness where language may have failed me. Compelled to narrate, I paint a world I can live in.

As a precisionist focused on an urban industrial world and simultaneously on my European experience, I could reconcile two very different cultures in paint. Felix Angel, in the catalog for the Coors National Exhibition, wrote, “…this granddaughter of Spanish immigrants paints with a desire to grasp reality in detail, as if this is the best way to define and become a part of it."

I was awarded fellowships from Puffin Foundation, Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation, Inc. and two from New Jersey State Council on the Arts.

My 4 large-scale porcelain enamel on steel murals, “Between Manhattan and Meadowlands” are installed at Hudson-Bergen Light Rail Transit System’s Bergenline Avenue Station in Union City, NJ.
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I studied at New England School of Art (Boston, MA), painting at Art Students League in Woodstock, NY, and earned a BA in Fine Art from Rutgers University.

I have exhibited extensively for 50 years— internationally in museum, university, corporate, and alternative galleries.

A retrospective exhibition at the MORRIS MUSEUM (2013) entitled “IMMORTAL STRUCTURES: Here and There After” was followed by a solo exhibit,“Two Ships Esperando” at Galeria Siboney in Santander, Spain.