After a decade of meteoric success in music, including collaborations with Björk and Rosalía and supporting Beyoncé and Madonna, the Venezuelan electronic musician Arca—real name Alejandra Ghersi—crashed into burnout. Now, the 36-year-old artist has turned to painting as a form of recovery, with her first institutional exhibition opening at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London.
The exhibition, titled Angels, features canvases thickly layered with oils, acrylic, spray paint, glitter, latex and melted plastic. From this textured impasto emerge nightmarish faces: Cheshire cat grins, gurning clowns and wide-eyed demons. Ghersi says these works were never intended for public display but were a personal attempt to reconnect with her creative enthusiasm after falling out of love with music. “I didn’t know how to start to make another record,” she recalls.
Ghersi created the paintings in a communal yard in Barcelona, often working in a frenzy—painting, overpainting, melting plastic onto surfaces and even stabbing materials with a knife. She describes the process as a way of processing “different violences that I had survived” and notes that, despite a decade of Jungian psychoanalysis, understanding came through feeling rather than language. “I probably scared my neighbours a lot,” she adds.
The artist, who is queer and transgender, sees her works as both “mutants and angels,” drawing on post-Darwinian ideas of mutation and biblical representations of angels as “a tumult of wings and eyes.” Her early interest in visual art began as a teenager in Caracas, uploading 3D animations to DeviantArt from an isolated childhood. Music eventually provided an escape, leading to her prodigious career, but the paintings now mark a return to her roots—this time with no delete button.
