Marina Parra

Marina Parra doesn't paint portraits — she paints what it feels like to live inside a body. Born in Spain in 1991, trained in Fine Arts in Granada and in theatrical set design, she now works from Mexico City, where she's been based since 2021. Her practice sits at the intersection of figuration and gesture, and it hits you before you can explain why.

At Lola, her work presents a fragmented female figure captured through an intimate, partial frame — no face, no story, just weight, flesh, and presence. The palette runs warm and dense: ochres, browns, tones of skin. The body seems to dissolve into its background. Light doesn't illuminate here — it grazes. What you see is a torso understood more as matter than identity, and a tension between what is shown and what stays just outside the frame.

Her path from theater to canvas wasn't a detour — it was foundational. Stage design taught her to think about how bodies occupy space, how composition can hold an audience still. She's been exhibiting continuously since 2018, and more recently has expanded into sculpture, building three-dimensional forms from the same gestural instinct that drives her painting. She once modeled for paintings by the Mexican artist Fabián Cháirez — and she does dead-on impressions of people, which she considers a legitimate superpower.

When she's not painting, she's dancing. Or eating panditas. Or rolling — ask her about that one. Her guilty pleasure is strawberry ice cream, and if her life were a movie, it would be called No sé a dónde voy, pero voy con conciencia de clase. Her art explores the balance between the individual and the collective. At Lola, it feels like an invitation to sit with something unresolved — and find that the discomfort is the whole point.

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