Born in Santiago, Chile, in 1952, Eugenia Gajardo has lived in the US, France, Switzerland and the UK, before making Singapore her home for the last 40 years. In 2013, she decided to follow her dream to become an artist and briefly attended six months’ formal training in painting at the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts.

Mostly a self-taught artist, Gajardo later took some lessons with Iranian artist Ali Esmaeilipour to learn new techniques and further expand her creativity. She has since mastered various styles which show her experimental nature. Her initial style presents gestural artworks stemming from Surrealist automatism. Her second style depicts lyrical abstract images in the more traditional media of acrylic paint and her third one illustrates precious symbolist icons created with crystals, gold and silver -contemplative objects par excellence. Today, she consistently weaves her successful career as a counsellor and psychotherapist with her practice as a painter.

For Eugenia Gajardo, the pleasure of tactile involvement is crucial to painting. Using her hands, she spreads different mediums on the canvas to create strong textural effects that give material form to the ideal images she envisions. She has been probing the mysteries of the soul for many years and conceives her paintings as a receptacle of spiritual essence, a spiritual essence that she offers to the viewers through the tactile rendering of the paintings. Unorthodoxically, the artist conceives her paintings as objects to be experienced through touch. By inviting the viewers to glide their hand on the surface of the canvas, she allows them to perceive the sensations she experienced during the creation process.