B I O G R A P H Y
Laura Basterra Sanz (b. 1979, Barcelona) is a Brussels-based multidisciplinary artist working across painting, text, and spatial practices. Her work investigates painting as an embodied practice of improvisation, where gesture, colour, rhythm, and language become ways of exploring freedom, attention, and relation. Drawing on sustained engagement with nature, abstraction, and material processes, she creates works that invite open-ended forms of perception and resist fixed meaning.
She holds a BA in Fashion Design from Universitat Ramon Llull (URLL) and a postgraduate degree in Textile Printing, and is currently expanding her practice through sculpture and spatial art at the RHoK Academie in Brussels.
Since relocating to Brussels in 2018, Basterra Sanz has exhibited internationally, including at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, PILAR – Centre for Contemporary Art and Science at Vrije Universiteit Brussel. She has also completed a residency at MOTOCO in Mulhouse, supported by Kunsthalle Mulhouse and the François Schneider Foundation.
In 2025, she was awarded the International Art Prize by the Paul Smith's Foundation and Winsor & Newton. Her work has been featured in Forbes and Wallpaper* and is held in private collections internationally.
E X H I B I T I O N S
2028 - Shift Gallery, Seattle, WA, USA.
2026 - Paul Smith's Foundation, London, UK.
2026 - "Heatwave", Dodomu Gallery (online), Brooklyn, NY, USA.
2026 - "Summer Exhibition", The Royal Academy Of Arts, London, UK.
2025 - "Defining Your Point of View", Paul Smith Space, London, UK.
2025 - Paul Smith Antwerp, Antwerp, BE.
2025 - "On Beauty", Pictorem Gallery, London, UK.
2025 - "Essential: Essence in a Space", RHoK Woluwe, Brussels, BE.
2024 - "Separation, Connection, Circulation", GC De Rinck, Brussels, BE.
2024 - "We Art XL Coup De Coeur", Abbaye de La Cambre, Brussels, BE.
2024 - "La Fin des Semelles", Les Semelles, Charleville-Mézières, FR.
2023 - "Intimate/Synergy", MOTOCO, Mulhouse, FR.
2023 - "Mostly Looking for the Same Things", XIV LAB, London, UK.
2022 - "Hello there, I just wanted to ask how you're doing", PILAR Brussels, Brussels, BE.
2022 - "Art Open Kunst", Espace Vanderborght, Brussels, BE
2021 - "In The Circle of Light", See U Brussels, Brussels, BE.
2021 - "A Question of Lines and Evolution", The Sun-Day Room, Brussels, BE.
A R T I S T S T A T E M E N T
I work across painting and text to explore freedom as an embodied practice. My work unfolds through improvisation, where gesture, colour, language, and material respond to one another in the present moment. Each mark transforms the next, allowing painting to become a process of listening, attention, and discovery.
I think of painting as breathing. Layered surfaces compress and expand, carrying traces of movement, time, and presence. Colour functions as rhythm and vibration, while words emerge, dissolve, and reconfigure, resisting fixed meaning. My works create spaces where perception remains open and alive.
Time spent in forests and along the coast attunes me to rhythms that inform the studio, shaping a practice that values presence, slowness, and relation over productivity, competition, and certainty. Growing up in Barcelona, immersed in Catalan Modernism and its relationship among art, nature, and imagination, and amid the enduring social consequences of Franco's dictatorship, has shaped my commitment to creative freedom, to questioning inherited structures of power, and to imagining more compassionate ways of relating.
Through painting, I seek to practise transformation, cultivating spaces where rhythms of attention, empathy, and freedom can unfold and be shared. I understand painting as a living process of openness, attunement, and possibility.
Laura Basterra Sanz, June 2026
For any enquires please e-mail me: givemeabreakdance [at] proton [dot] me
Follow my studio life and more on INSTAGRAM @kung.fu.mistress or YOUTUBE @LauraBasterraSanz