AMY BRAVO

Amy Bravo (b. 1997, New Jersey) is a New York visual artist of Italian-Cuban origin, combines symbolism and icons from Latin American popular and religious culture and hyper-personal family stories, to invent her own vision, intimate and fantastic, of an afterlife universe in the rough shape of the island of Cuba, a mixture of the known and the unknown, of beauty and confusion.

Bravo’s approach to painting is unconventional. Rather than the classic stretched canvases, she prefers loose canvas which is cut and stitched together to create irregular shapes on which she mixes graphite drawing with painterly techniques and collage. The result are drawings which expand into painting, embroidery, and assemblage sculpture. She reaches for objects not limited to dried leaves, lace, carousel horse trinkets, pieces of furniture and artifacts from her own family home. This very personal combination of techniques, which gives pride of place to DIY practices, serves to bring together complex identities, to recompose a family lineage interrupted by exile, to challenge and communicate with her ancestors and to draw the contours of a mythical world. Her works thus give birth to a rural colony populated by amazons, boxers, rooster-women, and cowgirls, proud and free figures at the crossroads of the communities claimed by the artist: Lesbian and Latinx.

Born in 1997 in Park Ridge, New Jersey, Amy Bravo currently lives and works in Queens, New York. After completing a bachelor's degree in Illustration at Pratt Institute, New York, she obtained a Master of Fine Arts in Painting at Hunter College, New York in 2022. Recent exhibitions include group shows with Rachel Uffner Gallery, Workplace, and The FLAG Foundation, as well as a solo show at Nada Miami with Swivel Gallery and a duo show at Swivel Gallery, New York, in 2022. She was also a resident at the Fountainhead Residency in Miami in 2022.

Amy Bravo is jointly represented by Swivel Gallery (Brooklyn, NY) and Semiose Gallery (Paris)