About

Míriam Dema (Barcelona, 1995) is a painter whose practice is grounded in sensation, approaching the image as a space where emotional knowledge can remain open, materially present, and resistant to fixed meaning. Her work does not aim to describe experience, but to register its trace and intensity.

Rooted in memory and repetition, her practice returns to a limited vocabulary of forms drawn from the domestic sphere. Tables, chairs, flowers, fruit, and fragments of interior space appear as recurring structures through which intimacy, care, and human proximity take shape. These elements do not function as personal symbols, but as shared points of recognition, where private experience opens into something collective.
Memory in her work is not fixed, but continuously reactivated. Through repetition and variation, images are not reproduced but re-experienced, carrying subtle shifts in tone, density, and emotional charge. Nostalgia emerges as a complex condition in which tenderness and distance, warmth and ache, coexist without resolving.

Her material approach is inseparable from this position. Working with oil sticks, pastels, acrylic, and other media on wood, canvas, and varied textiles (jacquards, lace, velvet) she engages the surface through accumulation, friction, and interruption. Marks remain visible, edges unstable, textures uneven, allowing the painting to retain an immediacy where imperfection operates not as style, but as a means of staying close to what is felt before it is refined into clarity.

Her paintings unfold as spaces of quiet encounter. They do not impose meaning, but remain open, inviting a slower form of attention in which the image is first sensed and only gradually understood.

Dema’s work has been presented at ARCO Lisboa and SWAB Art Fair with Beta Contemporary, Barcelona, and exhibited internationally at venues including Maddox Gallery, London, and in group presentations in Paris, Madrid, and Dublin. Her public commissions include work for the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya and the Generalitat de Catalunya, and her practice has been featured in The Observer, Harper’s Bazaar, Elle Decor, and Metal Magazine, among others.