Maribel Nazco

Maribel Nazco grew up in Los Llanos de Aridane, on the island of La Palma, and her desire to dedicate herself to painting resulted in her to move to S/C de Tenerife to study at the School of Applied Arts and Artistic Trades. Some of her teachers there were the painters Mariano de Cossío, Álvaro Fariña and Pedro de Guezala. 


Her pictorial beginnings are marked by her affiliation with the Nuestro Arte collective, which led the cultural activity of Tenerife between 1963 and 1966, with the purpose of renewing the artistic and literary languages of the moment. In 1966, Nazco received the Honor Award from the VII Regional Exhibition of Painting and Sculpture; and in 1969, after her participation in several collectives, the critic Eduardo Westerdahl presented her first individual exhibition. In the seventies, Nazco developed a metallic and material work that grew her notoriety as an artist. In 1970 she returned to exhibit at the Municipal Museum of Santa Cruz de Tenerife. Soon after, in 1972 it was exhibited in the Sala Joven of the Ateneo de Madrid. She would also be one of the artists chosen by the Sala Conca de La Laguna for its 1972 programming. Likewise, she participated in the collective Homenaje a Millares at the Juana Mordó Gallery (1973).


She exhibited individually at the Ramón Durán art gallery in Madrid (1974), at the Aritza gallery in Bilbao (1975) and at the Catalan gallery Sarrió (1975), receiving praise from specialized critics. Her career grew in such a way that Carlos Areán introduced her to Spanish sculpture and painting, and the critic Gillo Dorfles included it in his monograph ‘Latest trends in today's art’. In 1975 she received the “Miguel Tarquis” Honor Award at the XVI Regional Exhibition of Painting and Sculpture of Santa Cruz de Tenerife. In 1977, she exhibited at the art gallery of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Vegueta, and shortly after, in 1977, she returned to Madrid with an individual exhibition at the Centro Difusor de Arte Kandinsky. Eduardo Westerdahl published this exhibition in the monograph for the Collection of Contemporary Spanish Artists. Added to this list are other individual exhibitions, such as those held in the Boticelli rooms (Gran Canaria, 1978), with a text by Maud Bonneaud; in the Joan de Serrallonga art gallery (Barcelona, 1979); and in the Leyendecker gallery (Tenerife, 1979), in addition to other collective exhibitions.


She obtained her bachelor's degree from the Faculty of Fine Arts of the ULL on June 16, 1980, and her doctorate in Fine Arts with the qualification CUM Laude on October 30, 1986, with research on the procedures used in alloying and experimentation with the metals. In 1989, she obtained a Professorship in Pictorial Procedures and Techniques at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the ULL, where she assumed several positions of responsibility, serving as Dean for several terms.


From 1985, she abandoned metals and dedicated herself exclusively to painting. That same year, she exhibited at the Círculo de Bellas Artes de Tenerife, and in the nineties she rejuvenated her pictorial work with the controversial collection, Icons of the City (1991) in which she developed a work that draws on representation: illusory images of metallic objects, transformed into urban still lifes. In 2012 TEA Tenerife Espacio de las Artes dedicated a retrospective to it, under the care of the center's Curator, Isidro Hernández, who also signed the monograph published in 2018 for the BAC collection of the Government of the Canary Islands. In 2021, Nazco was awarded the Canary Islands Fine Arts Prize.


Different critical voices such as Carlos Areán, Celestino Celso Hdez., Olga Darias, Fernando G. Delgado, Francesc Galí, Daniel Giralt-Miracle, José Hierro, José Otero, Julio Trenas and Eduardo Westerdahkl, among others, have written about her work, and have built up an abundance of positive review of Maribel Nazco's sculpture-pictorial career.


The Maribel Nazco Canarian Foundation has recently been created. Currently, the artist continues to experiment with a new pictorial series called Jardín de los desechos (Garden of Waste).