BIOGRAPHY
Driven by her passion for aesthetics, self-exploration, and psychology, Claudia Concha has been both the student and pioneer of her artistic practice for over three decades. Her work explores the expressive power of calligraphy through abstract painting, installations, performances, and collaborative art experiences, focusing on gesture as a language that connects the body, emotion, and different levels of consciousness.
In 1994, Concha graduated as an architect from Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia, and as part of her studies attended Heriot-Watt University in Scotland. Fascinated by the history of architecture and eager to explore new forms of expression, she later studied art and the techniques of Renaissance painting, drawing, and sculpture in Florence, Italy. These early experiences shaped her understanding of structure, composition, and aesthetics, which later became an underlying framework in her artistic practice.
After returning from Florence, Concha began to move away from traditional approaches to art and toward a more experimental and uninhibited way of working. For the next eight years, she participated in an Abstract Expressionism fellowship with artist Rita Miranda in Bogotá, Colombia. During this period, she challenged traditional rules of composition and aesthetics and began developing her own artistic language. As part of this process, she painted exclusively in black and white for eight years, avoiding color in order to relinquish control and resist the impulse to anticipate the outcome of the work. Through this disciplined process, her visual language began to emerge.
By painting with her eyes closed and using her non-dominant hand, Concha developed a practice intended to bypass control, distract the ego, and allow other parts of the body and consciousness to participate in the creative process. Gesture became a way of accessing memory, emotion, and inner experience, and the act of painting became a form of dialogue between the conscious and subconscious mind.
In 2003, Concha moved to Los Angeles, where she opened her studio and established herself as an artist. Her interest in human behavior, the mind, and consciousness led her to pursue graduate studies in Spiritual Psychology at the University of Santa Monica, where she received a Master’s degree with an emphasis in Consciousness, Health, and Healing in 2014. During this time, she began what she calls the Gestural Art Project, a study that combines the practices of Spiritual Psychology and Art.
In 2015, she completed the Soul Centered Professional Coaching Program at the University of Santa Monica and founded ArThrough®, an experimental space and methodology that provides a space to share, coach, heal, express, and take risks through art. Through ArThrough, Concha leads workshops, collaborative paintings, and participatory art experiences where individuals and groups explore intention, emotion, movement, and expression through gesture and color.
Her work has expanded into collaborative and socially engaged art projects with institutions such as the University of Southern California, the City of Santa Monica, schools, and community organizations. These participatory works often involve large collaborative paintings created with eyes closed and using the non-dominant hand, focusing on intention, healing, connection, and collective creation.
Concha has exhibited her work in the United States and internationally, including The Other Art Fair in London and Los Angeles, Red Dot Miami during Art Basel, Superfine Art Fair San Francisco, and numerous exhibitions and projects in Los Angeles and Santa Monica. Her work continues to evolve through painting, installation, performance, and collaborative art as an exploration of gesture, silence, movement, and the space between inner experience and visual expression.