Liza Ambrossio (1993, b.Mexico City) is a multidisciplinary artist & Filmmaker, Mexican who lives and works in France. She began her artistic practice at the age of sixteen when she asked an ancient maid from her mother’s house to steal the photographs from the family albums looking for traces of a dark past for which there seemed to be no evidence. At the same time in her native Mexico City, Ambrossio portrayed her transition from adolescence to adulthood looking for ways to survive from a distance during a chaotic and stormy process of emancipation from her family. After the suicide of her roommate and only friend from adolescence, she inherited his job as a “nota roja” photographer (police press), covering murders, accidents, and torture by drug traffickers at dawn for a local newspaper. Ambrossio goes on a journey of psychic and physical discovery flooded with disturbances, magic, trauma, dreams, and visions. In these moments, she discovers that the hell inside contains the same hell that explodes outside.

After concluding her university studies in Politics at the Facultad de Ciencias Politicas y Sociales in the U.N.A.M., Mexico City, specializing in negotiation and management of political and social conflicts related to drug trafficking and state issues at U.T. (EE.UU.), she received multiple scholarships in the United States and Europe, among them; the Descubrimientos scholarship for the Master in Photography and artistic projects at the PIC.A school awarded by the PHotoEspaña festival and the editorial house La Fabrica, and her second Master from the Transforming Arts Institute in Madrid, Spain.

Living a nomadic life without a formally artist studio, declares her mind as her home, she emerges as a leader of work teams in freedom, rejecting nationalist identification almost as if it were an mental illness, drawing inspiration from the places where she lives, loves, plays, reflects, and travels, in a real or imaginary way. She develops obsessive notebooks, models, videos, and collections of works using local materials and getting local people involved boosting their innate abilities, these dialogues unresolved circumstances and that represent a permanent travel diary as an alternative to life, in a territory of codes that are constantly confused with the map of images of her different series.

Her work embraces a multidisciplinary and conceptual approach that can be situated within the realm of ecofeminism, psychomagic, the erotics of power and the psychological game of free association that narrates controversial situations within recent history with a deeply intimate, sentimental, intellectual and feminine approach, which in turn surrounds the aura of the global political pulse. The hypermodernity of her artistic production depends on the medium used, with references to different milestones in the art history, from art povera, neoexpressionism, romanticism, gothic, or victorian… ultimately converging her series into a personal symbolic language.

From an aesthetic perspective, her production is distinguished by a profound obsession with the deconstruction of the body, the mental landscape, the complexity of a sentimental alphabet that strives to build through different artistic or conceptual platforms, and the circularity between the magical, religious, organic, extravagant fetishistic and industrial esthetic. Ambrossio investigates the conceptual burden of the humility of materials, fragility, the sense of losing control in work with unorthodox materials, and the power of space.

In the words of the prestigious curator of Latin American art in the Tate Modern collections, the MUAC in Mexico City and art critic Cuauhtémoc Medina:

“The concatenation of themes and scenarios in works like that of Liza Ambrossio are testimony to an era that is increasingly less capable of simulating shared references, and that is paradoxically marked by the horror of a universalized blindness. It is perhaps for this reason that throughout the indecipherable prophecies of her different photographic series, texts, audios, sculptures, installations, drawings, paintings, models, sounds, books and videos, Ambrossio’s obsession with presenting the eyes as sign of blindness.

From the cover of “Blood Orange-Naranja de Sangre”, flooded with blue scratches and the empty gaze of the child, through the preference to show portraits of people who have their eyes closed or veiled eyes, to the macabre joke of two faces that cover the globule ocular with the yellow protein sphere of an egg yolk, Ambrossio possesses Duchampian qualities by rescuing the impossibility of vision. While in ‘La ira de la devoción-The rage of devotion,’ Ambrossio returns the observer’s gaze through her fidelity to her family archives. She consciously or unconsciously suppresses all other gazes. This absence suggests the edge of the unbearable: the denial of a space of truce, the suffocation of the absence of all contact and dialogue.The point where the eyes are no longer a window to any interior: where everything has become a terrible and opaque reflection, a well that reveals the terror of origin, fragile childhood, the root of all evil and all that is cursed.”

Her universe breathes a real attempt to understand the powers and weaknesses of the mind as a way to scrutinize the human experience, which goes through the past, present, and future time. Ambrossio is incorporating symbols alluding to witchcraft, eroguru, mythology, memories, and legends that she mixes with her written narrative, photo sculpture, photo books, objects, installations, sounds, paintings, drawings, performance, and videos that she unites by free association, schemes promoted by her own theories related to psychological manipulation and its influence on the continuation or rupture of the power professed by the different social structures. Their approaches have an intense but anarchic relationship with chance and instinct and imply the destabilization of female canons that threaten the possibility of exceeding ethnic, sexual, moral, religious, and political limits.

Ambrossio is the author of “The rage of devotion_La ira de la devoción” edited by La Fabrica, considered by the British Journal of Photography and El País as one of the most exalted and risky photo books of the year 2018, her work has been exhibited in Europe, the United States, Malaysia, Mexico and Singapore. Including sites such as the Somerset House in the UK, the Palazzo Palmieri and the Ex Mattatoio-Rome in Italy, the Göteborgs Konstmuseum in Sweden, the Museum of Contemporary Art (MACQ) in Mexico, the Museum of Contemporary Art of Zagreb (msg) in Croatia, the Museum National of Contemporary Art (ΕΜΣΤ), in Greece, Casa de America in Spain within the official selection of PHoto España 2021, the Manuel Rivera Ortiz Foundation, during the Rencontres de la photographie de Arles 2022, the Académie française and the Collection Lambert in Avignon, France; also international fairs such as Art Basel, Arco, Photo London, UNSEEN, Zona Maco and JustMad. Ambrossio’s imaginary has been reviewed by Art Nexus, The British Journal of Photography, The Magnum Foundation, El País, Babelia, El Mundo, El español, Der Greif, GUP, Unseen magazine, Vogue, L’Officiel, El Universal, Fire cracker, and Lens Culture.

She has received the FNAC Nuevo Talento award in Spain, Voies Off in Arles, France the same year 2018, the Flash Forward in Canada, the PhEST in Italy, and the PHmuseum New Generation Grant in the United Kingdom during 2019. In 2020 she was awarded by the annual photography residence from the Musée du Quai Branly – Jacques Chirac in París, France. Ambrossio was member of the Casa de Velazquez (L’Académie de France à Madrid), also she was recently nominated for the prestigious Prix Pictet in Switzerland, the Prix of Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation (CIFO), and the Arts Electronica in the EE.UU. The years 2021-2022 she won the Singapore International Photography Festival (SIPF), and the Helsinki Photo Festival, and exhibited at the Yvon Lambert collection in Avignon, France. Ambrossio was invited to the Women’s Forum for the Economy and Society as a speaker at the table: “When art calls for social change”, recognized by the Financial Times, like one of the most influential forums in the world. Also she has presented her second photo book “Blood Orange_Naranja de Sangre”, during 2023 recently presented her third book entitled “Toda devoción causa ira” by the Spanish editorial Pepitas de Calabaza and her first major career solo show in the Sala Amos Salvador with a route of a thousand meters of art works with the same title as her book, for 2024 Ambrossio works on her four book entitled “The witch stage”.

Ambrossio has received favorable reviews regarding her different projects from top international curators and art critics such as Arianna Rinaldo, IT, Cuauhtémoc Medina, MX, Chema Gonzalez, SP, Christine Barthe, FR, Fabienne Aguado, FR, Jae Seok, KOR, Javier-Martín Jiménez, SP, Patricia Sorroche, SP and Johan Sjöström, SWE. Her works are part of important collections such as the Musée du Quai Branly – Jacques Chirac, Paris, FR, The Académie de France à Madrid, SP, among others.