Valeria Guerra-Garcia is a multidisciplinary artist working in painting, printmaking, installation, and video. Her practice explores faith, devotion, and sacrifice, focusing on the power dynamics between worshiper and worshiped. Rooted in her Catholic upbringing, her figurative paintings evoke the tension between reverence and suffering, while her videos extend these narratives through movement and ritual, bringing her painted figures into a living, temporal space. Through immersive altars, she invites viewers to confront silence, prayer, and the longing for divine response.

During her time at ´ace, Valeria had time and space to experiment with materials and techniques that allowed her to expand her practice in new directions. This materialized in an installation titled Now You Pray: fragment of the Hail Mary, which took the form of a Peruvian altarpiece without seeking to exalt the sacred. Instead of gold and wood, the altar is made of cardboard, plastic tablecloths, and graphite, materials that speak of the ephemeral and discarded. Devotion here is not a firm truth but a constant erosion in the attempt to sustain itself. A sacrifice that occurs unseen. A faith that is exercised without reward. The work does not seek to produce faith, but to expose its mechanisms: what it asks for, what it takes, what it leaves behind. This altar is not a promise. It is an open question that remains in the viewer’s body. How much can be offered before disappearing? When does it cease to be faith and become punishment?

ARTIST STATEMENT

My work explores sacrifice, devotion, and ritual through the lens of womanhood and queerness. Through figurative oil paintings and print-based installations, I examine the unbalanced relationship between the worshiper and the worshiped—questioning the silence that follows unanswered prayers. Saints and sacrifice intertwine in my paintings, evoking the violence of devotion, where suffering is both a path to divinity and a spectacle. Sacrifice is woven into womanhood and queerness—an expectation, a duty, a quiet surrender. My figures inhabit intimate spaces of worship, shaped by the Catholic culture of my upbringing in Lima, Peru. Isolated and uneasy, they embodied faith’s demands on queer bodies and femininity, reflecting the violence of devotion and the expectation of submission. My print-based installations extend this narrative into space, centering text as both relic and residue of belief. The repetition of text in my print-making work acts as a ritual in itself. The act of printing the same word on iterations of the same object becomes a ritual and prayer, where the text can be read as a mantra or plea. The altars I create using the printed objects as their conceptual center become spaces of ritual that highlight the dynamic of the worshipper and the worshiped, turning the viewer into both subject and outsider. The altar becomes a reflection of the viewer’s relationship with worship, exploring the deep desire for answers that is rooted in prayer, faith, and queerness.