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Selva Aparicio Biography

Selva Aparicio (b. 1987) is an interdisciplinary artist working across installation and sculpture to dig deeper into ideas of memory, intimacy, and the temporality of life. She was raised on the outskirts of Barcelona, a land once cherished by the Catalan bourgeoisie, which was abandoned and reduced to ruins during the Spanish Civil War. Later, it was transformed into a refuge for squatters, immigrants, and society’s outcasts and is now being reclaimed as a natural park. Aparicio found solace in nature from a young age and cultivated a profound interest in the ephemera. She received her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2015 and her MFA in sculpture from Yale University in 2017, honing a practice that foregrounds a unique reverence for the discarded in explorations of life, death, and rebirth. Aparicio was awarded the JUNCTURE Fellowship in Art and International Human Rights in 2016, the Blair Dickinson Memorial Prize in 2017, and a MAKER Grant from the Chicago Artist Coalition in 2020. She was named one of the 2020 breakout artists in Chicago by Newcity, received the Pritzker Pucker Family Foundation’s Artadia Award in 2022, the 3Arts HMS Fund Award in 2023, and the 2023 Burke Prize. Her sculpture Auto-da-Fé, exhibited at EXPO Chicago 2023, was acquired by the DePaul Art Museum with funds from the Inaugural Barbara Nessim Acquisition Prize. She served as the International Randall Chair in Sculpture and Dimensional Studies at Alfred University in New York and is currently working on two outdoor permanent sculpture commissions for Belgium’s Beaufort 2024 Triennale and the Heraclea Archeological Park in Italy.