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There has been endless talk about the dramatic effects that the coronavirus has caused on the health system and the economy, but not so much talk has happened about how it has affected the art world – especially, how it has affected the work of creators. The new reality that emerged during the lockdowns and the virulence with which the pandemic hit the world gave visibility to a being –evidently invisible– that completely rocked the status quo.
One of the artists whose work was affected by the COVID-19 crisis is Nisa Goiburu, who worked during the lockdown on three different painting series. Just as a layman in Egyptian culture can be attracted to hieroglyphs without understanding their meaning, Goiburu perceived the virus as something incomprehensible. Inspired by that uncertainty, she created a collection of paintings on paper made up of small colorful strokes organized inside structures – a reflection of human codes and codes of nature. Each line could be interpreted as one of the graphic symbols of the ancient Egyptians’ writing read by an illiterate, or as a virus in motion within societies.the viewer is free to interpret the work however he or she wishes, although Nisa recognizes a significant influence from her trips to Egypt, as well as from the unique trace of Taoist culture.
Writer Joxe Mari Iturralde describes the artist’s work as “lyrical painting, firm, determined yet without extreme drama. It is not epic painting, we are not being told a story through thick brush strokes; on the contrary, it is a type of subtle painting, of approximation, with appropriate and precise use of insinuation. Here there are no dramatic screams, there are no great Homeric heroes; conversely, there is firm suggestion with the fragility and strength of a woman at the same time. […] Pieces of intense lyricism, of great sensitivity; but, simultaneously, of great expressive and dramatic strength. Paintings of enormous plasticity which remain fixed in our mind with powerful tension for a long time. Nisa Goiburu’s work is strength and it is poetry.it is intensity and it is lyricism.”
‘The Goddesses,’ by Nisa Goiburu: Alone here wrapped in green
I feel happy
Alone here I connect to an endless world
Alone here
I listen in my emptiness and I think of you
Alone here
I breathe the warm air of this feast
Alone here on the green grass I leave my latent mark until you arrive to me
Contrary to the lethargy which society was subjected to during the confinement, Nisa felt an inner strength that helped her to be prolific in different disciplines. One thing that characterizes this artist is precisely her heterogeneity when creating: Goiburu works, with the same diligence, the genres of painting, sculpture, poetry, dance, and performance, and she masterfully combines these fields into works of great impact.
Her works are part of individual and collective exhibitions and are present at contemporary art fairs in France,sweden, Morocco, the USA, Canada, and Japan – amongst others. Her last international exhibition in a gallery in the Chelsea neighborhood of London coincided with the coronavirus outbreak. This pandemic, like any other adversity that
Nisa has had to face in life, has done nothing but strengthen her inner world, causing it to erupt in a frenzy.
In this context, it seems appropriate to once again take up the words that writer Joaquín Araújo dedicated to the artist’s work a few years ago: “Breathing consists of bringing the external into the internal.the work of Nisa Goiburu breaths from the four sides. She takes what she has put into our gaze from life so that it finally reaches our kindest intimacy: emotion. Just as the atmosphere breathes life into the body, her art fertilizes the closest thing to truth that we have: our sensibility.”