Painting and drawing is my chosen medium. I work alone, usually. It
allows me to bring several worlds together, using several sources
simultaneously. The painting digests the information using color and
shape- fragments of the parts I listen to, look at, and find through the
lens of a camera. The chatter of life somehow reshapes itself into a
delicious bouquet; the painting lives on its own terms, residue of a
journey that is ever-moving. I take breaks along the way to ponder
the steps. Painting records those moments, those hours, those days
spent mostly in silence, watching, provoking, insisting on the time
needing to unfold. My paintings surprise me, most of the time, when
the moment comes to release them from the studio. I need to paint,
in order to share my life. I can’t imagine doing anything else.

Candida Alvarez (she/her) is widely regarded as one of her generation’s most highly innovative and experimental painters; her paintings and drawings are complex and vibrantly layered with color and shapes built from combinations of abstract and figurative forms that are rich in memory and reveal history and references to everyday life. 

Her work has been collected by the Art Institute of Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Whitney Museum, San Jose Museum of Art, Pérez Art Museum, Miami, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Addison Gallery of American Art, Baltimore Museum of Art, among others. Alvarez was recently granted the Arts and Letters Award in Art by the American Academy of Arts and Letters and is a 2022 recipient of a Latinx Artist Fellowship. She was awarded the 2021 Helen Frankenthaler Award for Painting by the Foundation for Contemporary Art, NY, and a Joan Mitchell Foundation Painter and Sculptors Grant in 2019. Alvarez is an alum of the Yale School of Art, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and is currently the F.H. Sellers Professor in Painting at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she has taught since 1998. 

Alvarez is represented by Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago.

Selected Works