Artist
STEPHANIE BACHIERO
“Stephanie belongs to a younger generation of artists who, looking back at the 1960s and ’70s, are inspired by minimalism and the Finish Fetish movement. She chose a hard-to-control medium that reflects the challenges she has had to face in her life, but she also brings intellectuality, a sense of playfulness and sensuality into her work.”
- Grace Kook-Anderson, Curator of Contemporary Art, Laguna Art Museum 2011
About the Artist
Born 1982, Torrance, California
Lives and works in Laguna Beach, California
Stephanie Bachiero manipulates porcelain clay to form elegant, seemingly undulating, minimalist sculptures. Twisting and turning, her graceful abstractions have the deceptive appearance of weightlessness, grounding themselves through components of negative space and solid architectural structure. Many of her works appear to defy gravity from every angle; her forms push and pull, expand and contract, creating a tension that represents the tension present in the conscious mind and in the human body.
In the lyrical forms of Bachiero’s work, it is impossible to separate out the artist’s personal narrative from the formal concerns of a contemporary sculptor. Bachiero views her sculptures as a way of thinking and communicating what she often cannot speak since she suffered severe head trauma in 2003 that impaired her cognitive and speech function. “Through sculpture, I can restructure the life I lost intellectually,” she says. “I still have this isolation in my mind, but I can have conversations with the porcelain as it moves.”
Bachiero’s sleek bronze and porcelain sculptures balance strength and fragility. Their refined, flowing forms mask the complexity of their creation, which requires fastidious attention to the material’s temperamental qualities. The process to discover these forms, and the various series and media in which they have existed in is part of an ongoing dialogue with form, logic, and limitation.
Bachiero received her BA in Fine Art Studio from Boston College in 2007 and has exhibited throughout Southern California. Her work has been juried into the New York Armory Show and exhibited at the Laguna Art Museum and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.
Installation Shots
