Laura Mesa Lima

Laura Mesa Lima (Tenerife, 1975) is a visual artist, lecturer and researcher at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of La Laguna. In recent years, her work has focused on exploring the complex relationships between reality and its representation, reflecting on the materiality of representations based on an ‘expanded’ conception of the practice of drawing, embodied in a set of works that can be considered solid, spatial or installation drawings. Her current work explores new formalizations and focuses on the categorizations of the fiction of the real, as well as the complex relationships between space, nature, and landscape. In recent pieces such as Cuerpo que falla (Failing Body), fragility and vulnerability are manifested through structures of precarious stability (a structure that props itself up), seeking to generate an image of contingency and transformation in relation to the ideas of matter and body.

Residency dates: 1. 9. – 30. 11 .2025

RESIDENCY PROJECT

“Here, there, over there is proposed as a look at the third landscape of Prague. Third landscape is a concept defined by Gilles Clément as “the set of abandoned spaces of the territory whose obvious –and henceforth necessary– function is to accommodate species that cannot find other spaces”. Observing (investigating) those plants that are occupying spaces, leaving footprints, configuring reserves or ghettos, generating, in short, a (new) landscape is the object of the project and the material with which I will work; they will be the key to the plastic formalization, the very core of what to make, of making art.

The aim of merging these processes (invasion and creation) is to question the construction of the landscape and, therefore, of our gaze linked to a time and a place. Is proposed as a tension of the commonly accepted ideas about the identity of place, reflecting on geological and cultural times, on how the drifts of species around the planet, overflowing the abstractions of political boundaries and temporal and geographical belongings, constantly redefine what we consider “natural” landscape.

Perhaps finding that third landscape is a possibility to overcome objective distances and reposition the gaze. At least that is my proposal, being as I am, at the same time, an invasive species. Perhaps we artists are a species that finds no other space in which to develop than from that act of making. To make from what is available, from what is in the place, to think what that place is, what Prague is.”

EDUCATION

2018 Graduate en Philosophy

2008 PhD in Fine Arts, specialising in drawing

1998 Bachelor's degree in Fine Arts, specialising in painting and drawing

In addition to these higher university qualifications, she has completed numerous training courses in art and thought with the aim of furthering her education in relation to her research interests.

SELECTED EXHIBITIONS

solo exhibitions

2024 Cuerpo que falla. Artizar Galley. Tenerife.

2021 Pensar el final compromete el final. SAC [Contemporary Art Gallery of the Government of the Canary Islands].

2020 Pero no el mundo. Artizar Gallery. Tenerife.

2019 Laura Mesa. EXHIBITLab. Santander.

2018 Los móviles y el dibujo. CIC El Almacén. Lanzarote.

2017 1364. Ateneo de La Laguna. Tenerife.

Group shows

2024 Bienal Contemporánea TEA 2024. TEA Tenerife Espacio de las Artes.

2023 Lo que pesa una cabeza. Escultura tras el 73. TEA. Tenerife Espacio de las Artes.

2022 Sala_do. Participation with the piece 300 in the exhibition resulting from the artistic residence Sala_do. International Sculpture Symposium. Fuerteventura.