Actual size: 42 x 59.4 cm

Catarina Diaz is a London-based contemporary artist with a Portuguese soul. Her art pieces aim at the viewer's grasp of inner beauty. Catarina's minimalist collages inspire the search for deeper meaning, challenging the viewer to find the rare centre inside that makes embracing beauty possible... all of it, with its imperfection, its duality and transcendent existence. Her art envelopes all senses slowly, calling for them in subtle but exquisite ways.
Maeve Doyle, the BBC art critic and curator, described her work as "Very, very transcendent pieces mixing realism with naturalism and spirituality".
Catarina's work explores the issues of female identity in contemporary times. The search for our true identity and the reconnection to nature and essence juxtaposed with urban life and what it represents in our life. Her artistic expression is, thus, a construction of short visual narratives about the feminine universe and its dialogue with the empowering and nurturing wild nature. A kind of frame that zooms in on issues related to the rescue of feminine power and identity, particularly, and of humanity, in general. These short stories are equally inspired by her childhood memories and the "tales of the jungle" narrated by her grandparents, always with a surrealist and colourful twist.
Catarina is a self-taught exploratory artist, not restrained by conventions or formal ways of interpreting the world. Instead, she relishes exploring various mediums, techniques, and methods according to her inspiration.
She enjoys experimenting and letting the artistic process flow freely and intuitively. She loves creating thematic series, all meaningfully brought together by her admiration for the feminine figure and wild nature. Composing primarily on paper and canvas, she particularly enjoys using oil sticks and acrylics in an abstract style, combining them in compositions of analogue collage.
Catarina's work is autobiographical. Still, it is the therapeutical expression of a more mature experience of the world, a sharing with which she intends to touch the viewer so that they can see themselves and become empowered by their own light.
After an accomplished long-life career in Teaching, PR, and International Relations, she recently decided to embrace her artistic purpose, inspired by London's cosmopolitan life and art scene. She now collaborates with other artists, designers, filmmakers and composers on multiple projects.
In her short artistic career, her work has been awarded multiple times for artistic merit and publicly recognised by the President of Portugal.
It has been represented in digital installations, exhibitions and art fairs in London (The Saatchi, Oxford Street, The Design District), New York (Art Expo, Manhattan, Times Square), Paris (The Carrousel du Louvre), Padova, Milan, Lisbon (solo exhibition on a prime-time TV Show), Padova and Brussels. She has also participated in a few virtual solo and collective exhibitions by galleries in London, Paris, San Francisco and Abu Dhabi.
Catarina has also been featured on Portuguese and Canadian TV shows, BBC Jo Good's Vlog and in art and lifestyle magazines such as Artist Talk Magazine, The Flux Review, The Japanese 365 ART, House & Garden, The World of Interiors, Tatler, Vanity Fair and Vogue.