Carolina Ambida Biography

Carolina Ambida’s small monochromatic paintings are based on found images sourced primarily from the internet. Such images would have begun as a photograph before finally finding their way into newspapers, magazines and image banks on the web. Like the snapshot snippets Ambida’s paintings aspire to, they contain within them an adherence to their photographic purpose. However despite their given reference the paintings take on a very different guise and having shed some of their original purpose the paintings become more emblematic. Carolina Ambida is interested in articulating a feminine reality within the limits of female representation and the media at large. She states, ‘Painting enables me to engage in role-playing - where I take a pre-existing image and make it my own.’

Carolina Ambida’s paintings often depict lone female figures engaged in minor acts such as sunbathing, looking into a mirror, or walking along the beach, however, the paintings can also depict subjects who are engaged in more decisive acts such as the femme fatale brandishing a gun, or a ballerina on stage. The paintings are made wet-on-wet, so they are made in ‘one go’. Tentative brushstrokes give way to imbue the paintings with a febrile uncertainty, and material presence. Ambida relishes the idea of how a painting can start off somewhere and end up in a very different place – a place where painting cohabitates with photographic reality.

Carolina Ambida was born in Manila in the Philippines, and graduated from Goldsmiths, London in 2007. She has shown in a number of group shows in the city, and in 2006 her work was exhibited in the John Moores 24 Contemporary Painting Prize at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool. Ambida continues to live and work in London.