Iris Sanmartín Dalmau
Painting
Iris Sanmartín Dalmau (born in Barcelona, 1996). Born in Barcelona, where she lives and works. She studied illustration and self-publishing at Escola Francesca Bonnemaison and graduated as a Higher Technician in Plastic Arts and Design from Escola Massana. She is currently pursuing a degree in Philosophy at the University of Barcelona
Working primarily in painting, her practice is structured around processes of mark-making and erasure, which function as essential compositional tools. Through diluted layers, glazes, and techniques of abrasion, she works mainly with oil paint, cloth, and sandpaper, removing and reworking the image as part of the pictorial language itself.
Her work draws from personal writings and notes, photographs from her own archive, literary references, and motifs connected to the body, intimacy, and memory. She has presented her work in solo and group exhibitions in spaces such as Aula 46 (Barcelona), PANG Projects (London), Colette Mariana & Cocotte (Paris), and OLA Galería (Barcelona), and has developed research processes during a residency at Casa Antillón (Madrid).
Statement
My practice begins from the autobiographical as a territory from which to connect everyday experience with the mytho poetic dimensions that underlie it. I am interested in how the spaces we inhabit contain layers of memory, emotion, and fiction, and how painting can reveal these latent narratives.
I work through mark-making and erasure as fundamental gestures. I build images through diluted layers and glazes that I later remove, sand, or shift, understanding painting as a continuous process of appearance and disappearance. The image does not assert itself; it emerges, erodes, and reconfigures.
My works originate from texts, notes, and photographs from my personal archive, as well as literary references and motifs linked to the body, intimacy, and memory. Through this intersection between lived experience and imagination, I seek to explore how we relate emotionally to the immediate spaces around us, and how the act of painting can reactivate their invisible stories.
