Carolina Serrano (b. 1994, Funchal, Portugal) lives and works between Cologne (DE) and Lisbon (PT).
She has a degree and a master's degree in Sculpture from the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Lisbon, as well as a postgraduate degree in Art Curatorship from FCSH, NOVA University Lisbon.
Serrano has been exhibiting her work regularly since 2018, with the following solo exhibitions standing out: Inside of. Matjö - Raum für Kunst, Cologne (DE, 2024); Closed fists, open wrists, Galerie Alex Serra, Cologne (DE, 2023); Teeth to the bone, Text by Susana Ventura, Galeria UMA LULIK_, Lisbon (PT, 2023); What words to name, Text by Wilko Austermann, Galerie Alex Serra, Cologne (DE, 2021); Between the thumb and index finger, Text by Alexandre Melo, Galeria UMA LULIK_, Lisbon (PT, 2020) and Forever about to end, Curated by Mattia Tosti, Galeria FOCO, Lisbon (PT, 2020). Her group exhibitions took place in National Museum of Contemporary Art_ MNAC, Lisbon (PT); Kunstraum Botschaft, Berlin (DE); Biblioteca Municipal de Albergaria-a-Velha, Aveiro (PT); Mercês Cultural Space, Lisbon, ARCO Madrid (ES); MUSA - Sintra Museum of Arts (PT), Municipal Museum of Espinho (PT), among other.
In 2020, Serrano received a grant from the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation's Visual Arts Support Program. In 2021 she also received the Auf Geht's Stipendum grant from the Ministry of Culture of North Rhine-Westphalia (DE) and in 2022 the NEUSTART KULTUR work and production grant from the Stiftung Kunstfonds Foundation, Bonn (DE). In 2022, she was named one of the 7 Women Artists of the Future at ARCO Madrid 2022.
Serrano's work and research revolves around the temporal dimension of sculpture, the dematerialisation of sculpture and the attempt to understand what it means to be human by exploring opposing concepts such as good/evil, inside/outside, freedom/confinement, violence/innocence, light/shadow.
Serrano works mainly with wax, as this material comes closest to the temperature and texture of human skin, and because of the theoretical and conceptual possibilities that this material can originate in the field of the observer's imagination.
Through sculpture and installation, Serrano seeks to create images for universal concepts and abstract words, which have no physical body in the world and therefore no image, such as innocence, violence, tenderness, plenitude, and so on.
The exploration of duality and the antagonisms of existence is manifested in the artist's work through the creation of a place that exists between dualities, in other words, a place-limbo, or a place- between. The .concept of ‘being in-between’, which is linked to the attempt to define what it means to be human, is fundamental to Serrano's work, as the exploration of this ‘in-between space’ is what she looks to embody through sculpture.