PAULA VALENZUELA ANTÚNEZ PRESENTS WHAT DEATH DREAMS OF IN CHILE

As part of its 10th anniversary celebration, Galería CIMA, together with SPECIFIC, presents ¿Qué sueña la muerte?, a solo exhibition by Chilean artist Paula Valenzuela Antúnez (Santiago, 1988), marking a new appearance of her work on the Santiago scene after a period of travel and residencies between Buenos Aires, Berlin, Paris, Miami, and other cities.

Curated by Camila Alegría Zenteno and Daniel Aguayo Mozó, the exhibition brings together large-format abstract paintings in which color, gesture, and material come together as part of an intuitive and spiritual process. For Valenzuela, painting functions as a living language that must be listened to; intuition and the dissolution of the ego, as the artist puts it, are fundamental to the pictorial process: the image manages to open toward that which cannot be fully named.

In ¿Qué sueña la muerte?, the act of painting approaches a practice of attention and transformation. Rather than representing death, the exhibition proposes approaching it as passage, mystery, and impermanence: a force that runs through the very process of painting, where each gesture can imply a disappearance and, at the same time, the possibility of a new image. This approach deepens an inquiry the artist has developed around the poetic and spiritual dimension of art and its capacity to propose other ways of perceiving reality.

A graduate in Visual Arts with a concentration in Painting from Universidad Finis Terrae, Valenzuela has built her career across Chile, Argentina, Germany, and France. Milestones in her trajectory include her first solo exhibition, A qué velocidad, at Galerie Kastanien, Berlin (2020); a residency at Somos Art House, also in Berlin; A ojos cerrados, at Sobering Galerie, Paris (2021); and her participation in the Dijon Art Fair. Her work has also circulated through group exhibitions, spaces, residencies, and galleries in Santiago de Chile, Buenos Aires — where she lived for seven years — Berlin, and Miami. She is co-editor of the book Desbordar el cauce ("Overflowing the Riverbed"), a series of conversations with contemporary women artists in the context of the pandemic, published by Editorial Metales Pesados in 2025.

The exhibition runs through October 12 at Galería CIMA, Penthouse | Azotea—Merced 22, 11th Floor, 8320119 Santiago, Chile.