The Earthly Goddesses of Cristina BanBan

Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs. There is something irresistibly vital in Cristina BanBan’s painting that reminds us why we are interested in art in the first place. Her imposing canvases, populated with women of generous forms and oversized hands, do not politely ask for our attention, they demand it with a quiet authority that silences the ambient noise of the contemporary art world.

Born in 1987 in El Prat de Llobregat, on the outskirts of Barcelona, BanBan developed her distinctive visual language through a geographical journey that took her from Spain to London and then to Brooklyn, where she currently lives and works. This journey is no accident in the formation of her aesthetic. There is a permanent tension in her works between rootedness and displacement, between the monumental presence of bodies and their fragmentation, between memory and the immediacy of experience.

The female figures populating BanBan’s canvases are both familiar and strange. Their exaggerated proportions, the heavy legs, huge hands, massive feet contrasting with relatively small heads, create a visual dissonance that forces us to reconsider our perception of the female body. These women occupy space unapologetically, their forms often overflowing to the edges of the canvas in a categorical refusal of constraint. Yet, despite their imposing physical volume, these figures possess a palpable intimacy and vulnerability.

There is an undeniable fleshy quality in BanBan’s work. Her palette of flesh tones, pinks, ochres, browns, evokes the sensuality of skin, while her energetic brushstrokes create a tension between the solidity of the body and its imminent dissolution. The sinuous contours enveloping her figures contrast with areas of thick color, evoking the parity between human flesh and oil paint found in the works of Willem de Kooning and Lucian Freud ^[1].

What distinguishes BanBan is her ability to navigate between figuration and abstraction with remarkable ease. As she explains herself: “I am between these two worlds, and it’s exciting because I learn so much. All I want is to have fun in the studio. It makes no sense if I keep repeating the same things” ^[2]. This oscillation between figurative representation and gestural abstraction creates a visual dynamic that keeps her works in a state of permanent becoming.

BanBan’s figures often seem absorbed in their own inner world. They rarely look at each other or directly meet the gaze of the viewer. This introspection refers to the human isolation inflicted by the social and political disruptions of recent years ^[3]. Her nudes are sometimes punctuated by intimate underwear or adorned with hoop earrings and hair clips. They become resolutely contemporary, presenting powerful images of self-confident women in their relationships and spaces.

When looking at BanBan’s recent works, one cannot help but think of the Spanish philosophical tradition and its relation to the body. The philosopher José Ortega y Gasset wrote that “I am I and my circumstance,” a statement that deeply resonates with BanBan’s approach to the human figure. For her, the body is never an isolated entity but always situated within a context, imbued with personal and collective histories. Her female figures exist in a liminal space between autobiography and archetype, often bearing traits of the artist herself.

This autobiographical dimension is central to BanBan’s work. “I take my own image as a starting point, and I develop what interests me the most,” she confides. “Painting is like keeping a journal; I use female bodies to represent how I feel or what I see around me” ^[4]. This approach echoes the long tradition of self-portraiture in Spanish art, from Velázquez to Picasso, where the artist simultaneously positions herself as both subject and object of the gaze.

But BanBan goes beyond this tradition by fragmenting and multiplying her own image. In works like “Cristina,” a multiple self-portrait, she depicts herself at different stages of her life, creating a temporal dialogue that challenges narrative linearity. This multiplication of the self evokes Henri Bergson’s conception of time, for whom duration is not a succession of distinct moments but a continuous interpenetration of states of consciousness. BanBan’s overlapping figures embody this fluid conception of time, where past, present, and future coexist within the same pictorial space.

The way BanBan works with the painting medium is just as significant as her subjects. Her approach to oil painting, a medium she has adopted relatively recently, reveals a profound understanding of its materiality. “With oil, you never know how it will react,” she observes. “I needed to feel as if I was not in control, so that accidents could happen. It’s so beautiful” ^[5]. This openness to the unexpected, this willingness to embrace error and accident as integral parts of the creative process, gives her works a palpable vitality and immediacy.

BanBan’s process always begins with drawing, a practice she has cultivated since childhood. “Drawing is more like meditation, because I take the time to sit down. It’s more peaceful. Painting is the opposite. It’s more like gut feeling,” she explains ^[6]. This duality between the deliberation of drawing and the impulsiveness of painting creates a productive tension that animates her works. The precise contours of her figures are constantly threatened by expressive brushstrokes that seem to want to dissolve them into abstraction. BanBan’s transition to oil marks an important turning point in her practice. “Last year, I got bored of my own painting as if I had exhausted something in it. I felt the need to take a step back and change my approach to painting; I needed to be passionate about it again,” she confides ^[7]. This constant desire to question herself, to push the limits of her practice, is characteristic of an artist who refuses to rest on her laurels.

BanBan’s influences are diverse, ranging from the Japanese anime she watched as a child on Catalan television to American abstract expressionists. “I watch a lot of Willem de Kooning. Helen Frankenthaler. I also like Joaquín Sorolla,” she reveals ^[8]. This fusion of diverse cultural influences, from European pictorial traditions to Japanese popular culture, creates a hybrid visual language that resists easy categorization. But beyond these artistic influences, it is perhaps in literature that one finds the deepest echoes of BanBan’s work. The poetry of Antonio Machado, with its meditation on time, memory, and identity, offers a particularly fertile key to understanding her work. The poet wrote: “Traveler, the path / Are the traces of your steps / That’s all; traveler, / There is no path, / The path is made by walking.” These verses resonate deeply with BanBan’s processual approach, for whom painting is less a finished product than a record of a bodily engagement with the material.

This bodily dimension is central to BanBan’s work. She paints standing, in total physical engagement with the canvas. “I am not a painter who sits. I am quite active. I like the gesture and action of painting large canvases,” she explains ^[9]. This performative approach to painting inscribes her artist’s body into the work itself, creating a continuity between the represented body and the body that represents.

The oversized hands that characterize BanBan’s figures take on a particular meaning here. They become a metonymy for the creative process itself, a celebration of the manual labor of painting in an increasingly digitized world. “I think you can say a lot about someone’s hands. I am very attracted to hands, big hands. They always play a very important role in the composition of my paintings,” she observes ^[10]. This emphasis on hands also evokes the artisanal tradition from which BanBan comes. She tells how her grandmother, who was a seamstress, was the person who inspired her to be creative. This female lineage, this transmission of manual know-how, inscribes her work in a genealogy of female creative practices often marginalized in the official history of art.

The women BanBan paints are powerful not despite their size but precisely because of it. In a cultural context that values female thinness, her voluptuous figures constitute an act of aesthetic and political resistance. As she explains: “I like that they are powerful and real. They are also in their own heads, thinking about themselves” ^[11]. This interiority, this presence to oneself, contrasts with the tradition of the female nude in the history of Western art, where the woman is typically presented as an object of the male gaze. By refusing this objectification, BanBan situates herself in a lineage of female artists who have used body representation to challenge gender norms. As art critic Linda Nochlin observed in her seminal essay “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?”, female artists have historically been excluded from dominant art institutions and have had to create their own spaces and languages to express themselves. BanBan participates in this tradition of resistance by creating a pictorial space where female bodies exist for themselves, freed from the evaluative male gaze.

This political dimension of BanBan’s work is all the more powerful because it is never didactic. It naturally emerges from her practice, her engagement with the materiality of painting, and her exploration of her own lived experience. As she herself says: “It’s not that I have an intention, but when I look at them, I feel that they all occupy their own space, confidently, as they are” ^[12]. The question of space is important in BanBan’s work. Her figures occupy the pictorial space with a quiet assurance that challenges the conventions of female representation. But this occupation of space also has a personal and biographical dimension. Having lived between Spain, London, and New York, BanBan is particularly sensitive to questions of belonging and displacement. “I moved from Barcelona to London with a suitcase and did the same from London to here. I like the fresh start. I gave everything and then I started again here,” she recounts ^[13]. This material lightness contrasts with the emotional and physical density of her paintings. There is a productive tension between the nomadism of her personal life and the bodily anchoring of her figures. Her female characters seem both rooted in their corporeality and in a state of transition, their blurred contours suggesting an identity in constant flux.

This identity fluidity is also present in BanBan’s technical approach. Her recent transition to greater abstraction reflects a desire to free the figure from overly explicit narrative constraints. “I wanted to move as far away as possible from having clear narratives in my paintings, like, ‘Oh, these are two girls, two friends, talking in the kitchen.’ I knew how to do that, and at some point, it became boring for me,” she explains ^[14]. This evolution toward abstraction does not mean abandoning the human figure. On the contrary, BanBan uses abstraction to renew her understanding of the figure, to explore its expressive possibilities beyond simple narrative representation. “I’m trying to raise the figure even further. I am learning new ways to make marks, and I look more at the composition of each painting, the colors, and the texture, which I think is closer to how an abstract painter works,” she observes ^[15].

BanBan’s recent works bear witness to this productive tension between figuration and abstraction. The female bodies remain recognizable but are constantly threatened with dissolution by expressive brushstrokes and overlapping shapes. This visual ambiguity creates an open space for interpretation that invites the viewer to actively participate in the construction of meaning.

The temporal dimension is also fundamental in BanBan’s work. Her figures exist in a stretched present, suspended between memory and anticipation. This complex temporality is particularly evident in her recent works, where the bodies seem both solidly present and in the process of dissolving. This ephemeral quality evokes the fragility of bodily experience, its vulnerability to the passage of time and external forces.

The art critic Rosalind Krauss spoke of the “post-medium condition” of contemporary art, where traditional boundaries between artistic media are constantly questioned. BanBan’s work fits within this condition while reaffirming the ongoing relevance of painting as a means of exploring bodily experience. Her canvases demonstrate that painting can still surprise us, move us, and challenge us in a world saturated with ephemeral digital images.

What makes Cristina BanBan’s work so compelling is her ability to negotiate multiple tensions: between figuration and abstraction, between narrative and formal, between the personal and the universal. Her voluptuous female figures, with their oversized hands and introspective gazes, offer us an alternative vision of female corporality that celebrates its simultaneous power and vulnerability. In an art world often obsessed with conceptual novelty at the expense of engagement with materiality, BanBan reminds us of the enduring value of painting as an embodied practice. Her work invites us to reconsider our relationship to the body, our own and others’, and to embrace its irreducible complexity. In this, she does not merely represent the future of figurative painting; she actively reinvents its possibilities for our time.

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1. Skarstedt Gallery, “Cristina BanBan: Biography”, 2023.
2. Apartamento Magazine, “Cristina BanBan”, interview conducted in March 2021.
3. Skarstedt Gallery, “Cristina BanBan: Biography”, 2023.
4. Artnet News, “”Painting Is Like Keeping a Diary”: Rising Star Cristina BanBan on Exploring Her Psyche by Depicting a World of Doppelgängers”, May 20, 2022.
5. Juxtapoz Magazine, “Cristina BanBan: The Nuance of Memory”, interview conducted by Evan Pricco, 2022.
6. Interview Magazine, “Cristina BanBan is Getting ‘Raw to the Feeling’ in Her New London Show”, interview conducted by Rennie McDougall, October 10, 2023.
7. Juxtapoz Magazine, “Cristina BanBan: The Nuance of Memory”, interview conducted by Evan Pricco, 2022.
8. Apartamento Magazine, “Cristina BanBan”, interview conducted in March 2021.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid.
14. Interview Magazine, “Cristina BanBan is Getting ‘Raw to the Feeling’ in Her New London Show”, interview conducted by Rennie McDougall, October 10, 2023.
15. Ibid.