Maria Berrio, Nativity, 2014

Even if I am not religious, I always find incredibly comforting the image of St Mary with her baby son Jesus, not for its religious meaning but simply for the idealised representation between a mother and her child. In many of these images, both characters are highly placid, very quiet, so far from reality, but this is probably why it has the power to calm you down.

So, because tomorrow is Christmas and tonight many will celebrate the Nativity, I wanted to share a another nativity, one of the most beautiful one found in contemporary art: the Nativity from Maria Berrio.

Maria Berrio, Nativity, 2014

Like the rest of her collages, this work is stunning. Here again, she celebrate the woman and the nature, mixing with images taken in mythology and mysticism. Her figures are strongly serene, and with a clever use of the patterned Japanese paper, they are also multiple and colourful.

She said: “A lot of my work is autobiographical…it could be about me, or my time in the world and how I am feeling or what I am imagining. […] Of course, it also relates to other people and other things too, to imaginary beings, to ecology, to magical realism, to surrealism too, but at the same time [it] is always me.”1

Oh yes, it does relate to us, and this is why we are highly touched. How not to be deeply drowned to her world, where disproportioned creatures seem to appear from a dream, humans being are in total symbiosis with the wild, and the whole in a fantastic blast of colourful flowers? 🙂