Biography of
Alicia DeBrincat

Alicia DeBrincat was born May 15th 1979 in Stanford, California and grew up in Northern California. She earned her B.A. from the University of Oregon, during which time she also studied Art and Art History at the Instituto de Estudios Internacionales in Seville, Spain.

Art became an increasingly essential part of her life, and she was able to explore her fascination with pre-Colombian art at the Instituto Cultural Oaxaca in Oaxaca, Mexico, where she studied traditional Zapotec pottery-making. Through art, and increasingly painting, she found a language in which she could articulate what she experienced and observed, and female identity emerged as a central theme in her work. She continued to travel and create art while finishing her undergraduate degree, assisting with public sanitation projects in western Guatemala and living briefly in Havana, Cuba.

After earning her undergraduate degree, she spent time in California, Florida, and Latin America, where she worked at a state-run orphanage outside of the Costa Rican capital and was greatly influenced by the museums, galleries, and modern dance performances that she attended there. Returning to California in 2003, she established a studio, continued painting obsessively, and attended classes toward her M.F.A. degree at the Academy of Art in San Francisco.

She currently paints full time and lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her artwork is exhibited regularly in the United States and abroad, most recently at the Municipal Museum of Fine Arts in Rosario, Argentina; the Art Museum of Los Gatos in Los Gatos, California; La Luz de Jesus Gallery in Los Angeles, California; and the MonDak Heritage Center in Sydney, Montana. In addition, her paintings are in private and public collections, including that of the Florean Museum in Baia Mare, Romania.

Artist Statement

My work explores the female body and the experience of being a woman in today’s society. Each of my paintings begins as a series of photographs I take of my model for that painting, who is sometimes someone I know, sometimes a stranger, and occasionally myself. I paint from these photographs because I am interested in using the photographic medium as a point of departure from which my work evolves.

Often in our contemporary culture, a photograph of a woman, often retouched and digitally manipulated, is presented as the ultimate authority on how women look. I am interested in dismantling the photographic image as this ultimate authority. As I paint, I deconstruct the photograph with the gradual and organic process of painting and rebuild a shadow of it, intensely alive and subjective, on the canvas. This ghost image, the result of a photograph passing through my mind and out my hand, is both a scientific study of a woman’s body and a subjective statement about how it feels to be female in modern society.

My work simultaneously explores these two frontiers, the physical and the mental. My investigation of the physical focuses on accurately presenting the many and varied forms of the female body. The oil paint is applied with a relish for human physiology and explores my fascination with the body as an intricate, self-referential system.

The body’s exterior features, such as the hands, face, breasts, and back, are embellished by hints of interior elements – veins, bones, cellulite – pressing out against the skin and vying for visibility. These faint traces offer a quiet reminder of the vast internal geography of organs and systems that churns hidden beneath the surface of the skin and sustains each of our physical bodies for a limited period of time.

This silent, tumultuous interior world pressing outward and vying for visibility is, when interpreted on a less literal level, the psyche. Through an honest observation of the female body, a language of emotion emerges. My work investigates the intense interconnectivity of a woman’s mental and physical identities; the female body as portrayed in my paintings becomes a metaphor for the female psychological experience.

Much of my work questions a woman’s ability to forge an emotional identity independent of others’ influences, actions, and desires. There is a tension between the pull of these two identities: who one essentially is versus who one becomes as a result of experiences. The body becomes a vehicle for exploring these complicated emotional states and the psychologically significant experiences specific to being a woman.

Artworks by Alicia DeBrincat

Bloodlines - 2007

Cute Little Thing - 2007

Dangerous Garden - 2007

Dissecting Desire - 2007

Dreams of Flight - 2007

Itty Bitty Titty Committee - 2007

Jelly - 2007

Melting Harem - 2007

Numbers Game - 2007

Portrait of My Mother as a Mother - 2007

Produce - 2007

Rotting Bounty - 2007

Sad Valentine - 2007

Self-Portrait with Mudflap Girl - 2007

Sewer - 2007

The Drowning - 2007

Vessel - 2007

Womantree - 2007

Selected Group Exhibitions

2007

Love and Hate, Art SF Gallery, San Francisco, California.

Everything But the Kitschen Sync, La Luz de Jesús Gallery, Los Angeles, California.

Reality & Other Figments of the Imagination (Two Person Show), Elliott Fouts Gallery, Sacramento, California.

2006

International Painting Salon, Carbunari 2006, Florean Museum, Baia Mare, Romania.

Convocatoria Internacional de Arte 2006 (Traveling Exhibition), Venado Tuerto, Argentina; Provincial Museum of Fine Arts, Santa Fe, Argentina; Municipal Museum of Fine Arts, Rosario, Argentina.

30th Annual Art Show, MonDak Heritage Center, Sidney, Montana.

Mast Cove Gallery, Kennebunkport, Maine.

Los Gatos Art Association Annual Open Juried Show, Art Museum of Los Gatos, Los Gatos, California.

Esteban Sabar Gallery, Oakland, California.

2005

Art of the Everyday, Subterranean Gallery, Healdsburg, California.

War and Peace, Frank Bette Center for the Arts, Alameda, California.

Heart of Chaos, Brooks College, Sunnyvale, California.

Maitri Art Show, San Francisco, California.

A Love Supreme, Budget Gallery, San Francisco, California.

Awards and Honors

Distinguished Artist Award, Convocatoria Internacional de Arte 2006, Traveling Exhibition, Argentina.

First Place: Painting, Annual Open Juried Show (2006), Art Museum of Los Gatos, Los Gatos, California.

Honorable Mention: Painting, Annual Open Juried Show (2006), Art Museum of Los Gatos, Los Gatos, California.