Sofía Maldonado-Suárez is a Puerto Rican artist of Cuban descent, from San Juan, Puerto Rico. She has spent most of her career focused on derelict spaces, constructing a poetic experience of colorful abstractions, within uninhabited buildings. Maldonado's urban walkabouts inspired a desire to transform the environment with color by painting abandoned structures using a paint sprayer. Her career is focused on public art and color field painting. The artist also has a dynamic studio practice as a painter and digital illustrator. She develops a sense of community through workshops and versatile community engagement projects. Collaborations with musicians and underground subcultures are an integral part of her artistic practice and aesthetic.
Maldonado's characteristic style is recognizable for its Caribbean palette and roots in muralismo. She deconstructs organic forms in order to explore color fields in her work. She represents feminine energy in her expressive outlines and sensually themed drawings. The artist’s colorful landscapes extended in space indicate the passage of time and the ephemerality of architectural structures. Maldonado's highly saturated, almost fluorescent, tropical palette reflects her animated personality and creates optical vibrations due to her energetic marks and distinctive application of color.
Throughout her career, Maldonado’s illustrations of femininity have been defiant and present the pleasure associated with the female experience in detail. A deep awareness of spatial deconstruction and what has been established are manifested in her architectural color interventions.
As an artist she reflects her colonial reality in site-specific projects such as Kalaña, exhibited at the Whitney Museum Biennial, NY (2017). In this project, as in her massive abstract murals, she employs color as a signifier of abandonment, rather than as a beautifying agent. Maldonado explores the spectrum of the feminine body by challenging cultural myths and social constructs from the outlooks of hip hop, trap music, and reggaeton.
Maldonado has earned a BFA from the Escuela de Artes Plásticas de Puerto Rico and an MFA from Pratt Institute, in Brooklyn, New York. She has participated in select exhibitions: PST:LA/LA at MOLAA, California (2017), La Bienal de Asunción, Paraguay (2014), CAAM, Canary Islands (2013), Museum of Art and Design, NY (2013), Museum of Contemporary Art of Puerto Rico (2012), Museo del Barrio Biennial, NY (2011) and the Havana Biennial, Cuba, and Real Arts Public, Real Art Ways, Hartford, CT (2008). She was awarded the Manhattan Community Arts Fund Grant, LMCC, (NY) in 2012.
