We warmly invite you to experience Yamila Miglioranza’s first solo exhibition outside of Spain, at Circle Culture Berlin during Berlin Art Week 2025. Join us for the opening on the 11th of September from 18:00 to 21:00 at Gipsstraße 11, 10119 Berlin.
In the exhibition Mit Haut und Haar Yamila Miglioranza presents painting as a fully embodied act that is both meditative and sacrificial. Working with acrylic paint, water, her hands and often her entire body, Yamila enters a deep state of presence where movement, memory and material merge.
The exhibition title is taken from the German expression mit Haut und Haar which means giving oneself completely. This idea captures the essence of Yamila’s approach. Her process is intuitive and physical. She begins with brush and water but soon transitions into direct contact with the canvas. Energy and emotion flow freely through her body, her hand and the bristles of the brush.
Her choice of materials, acrylics layered, watered down, blended and shaped with water, allows her to create richly textured surfaces that evoke organic human structures such as skin, fibers, hair or even wood. The earthy, tactile palette she employs, ranging from warm ochres and deep reds to ghostly whites and muted blues, recalls natural pigments and bodily substances, rooting her work in a material dialogue with nature and the body.
“I see no separation between human skin and the skin of the earth.”
“I stop when I surprise myself with what I’ve done.”
Yamila paints in a trance-like state guided more by her instinct than by a plan. She often compares this process to a psychoanalytic session that is unpredictable, vulnerable and ultimately revealing. The canvas becomes a space where emotion is externalized in raw and honest form.
Philosophically, her approach resonates strongly with the phenomenology of the body, particularly the work of French philosopher Maurice Merleau Ponty. Contrary to viewing the body as a mere object, this philosophical tradition understands the lived body as the center of perception and experience, a medium through which we relate to the world and to others. Merleau Ponty emphasized the body as a sensing, knowing subject, not something we have, but something we are. In Yamila’s painting, this translates to a bodily knowing expressed through touch, movement and material engagement, where the act of painting is a form of embodied perception. The canvas becomes a meeting point where self and world intertwine, and the visible emerges from the felt.
Born in Buenos Aires in 1997 and now based in Barcelona, Yamila began her creative journey with photography and film. She studied art direction and developed a strong sensitivity to space, atmosphere and visual rhythm. During a period of migratory grief painting became her personal language. What started as a spontaneous release turned into a central form of expression. Today painting is Yamila’s way of being fully present. In a world full of distraction her studio practice offers a space of deep focus. Each canvas is a trace of that moment. Flesh, movement, water and color come together as one.
For the first time beyond Spain, Yamila brings her powerful, intimate works to Berlin and will be presented at Circle Culture Gallery Berlin during the Berlin Art Week.