Biography

Lucrecia Urbano was born in Córdoba, Argentina. She received her BFA from the National University of Córdoba, with a major in printmaking. She has specialized in non-toxic photogravure and digital graphics in Canada and the United States (Pyramid Atlantic, Baltimore, Maryland and the Canadian School for Non-toxic Printmaking).

She is the founder and director of Zona Imaginaria, a contemporary print studio and international Residence project called “Who can live in this house?”.

Her personal work is orientated to research and different techniques combination: non-toxic printmaking, photography, video, digital prints, glass and installations. In addition, Urbano organizes research and teaching workshops as well as curates exhibition projects, focusing on interpersonal relationships and on the connection between the local community and the environment.

She is a visiting professor in the UNC (National University of Cordoba) and also teaches in her studio. She has taught at La Plata University, in San Pablo FAAP and in Escola de Artes Visuais de Parque Lage, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

Illustrated Talk

Zona Imaginaria – Contemporary Graphic Studio + Residence
Zona Imaginaria Studio is an open active space oriented in research, exchange, experience and print media trainings for artists. With it’s diverse seminars and courses, focused on graphic and new printmaking techniques it intends to relate every artist’s production to its contemporary art context.
Zona Imaginaria Residence “Who can live in this House?” aims to create a dialogue between local and foreign artists, offering them the opportunity to establish connections with local community artists. The residents are able to participate, operate, and the most important thing: take part of it. The space has also become a sharing space which, reflects the different cultural, national and artistic identity of each inhabitant. Every resident has access to the fully equipped graphic studio, where they have the opportunity to explore the possibilities of applying print techniques to their work.

Zona is located at 3386 Chile, a street in the deprived neighbourhood of San Fernando to the North of the city of Buenos Aires, Argentina. This is a few meters away from Uruguay, a street which divides San Isidro, one of the most exclusives areas of Buenos Aires, and San Fernando. In 2009 San Isidro’s municipal council decided to build a wall which would physically affirm the invisible line between the two areas. The erection of the wall was condemned by the people  and the National Government, causing the wall to be pulled down. The tensions between the two areas which the studio straddles has given “Zona Imaginaria” and it’s projects an aim: the artists working out of the space are united in their desire to erase social differences with art accions.

Exhibition – Open Folio

Gemas Artificial Nature – Objects – Instalation + Photos
Mending crystal fragments took me to think about the possible reparation, restoration, the perpetuity. Nothing ever goes back to the first image, to the reconstruction of the original plan. 

I been working with artificial nature creating “Glass Flowers” recycling glass bottles and crystal discard from a glass factory.
The discarded is renewed in beauty and art growing a fragile flower garden, ethereal, delicate and dangerous. Flowers in a garden, is an extension of an urban garden project workshop called “The vegetable garden” held in Zona Imaginaria, San Fernando. Its an engagement with neighbours and workers from a crystal factory in Ezpeleta, recovered by a cooperative of workers after the 2001 crisis. Thus combining my own techniques and materials. The neighbours collaborated by bringing bottles of wine and beer that I recycle the blast furnace smelting, glass vulgar utilitarian symbolic hybridization between high and low culture, between nobles and urban waste materials. I would like to relate this with my daily life so I also perform an important social action in my studio, teaching art classes to 40 children in a slum and so there is a new opportunity to flourish, to collaborate and share, to rebuild and rethink. To see the opportunity in every seed of thousands of fruits.
Performs all the circuit by manipulating a material that allows all states of matter. Glass and crystal combine beauty with a quality of danger, risk, places the boundary question. The ambiguity between the origins of the elements and materials creates a zone of mystery, another imaginary zone, Zona Imaginaria.