Sheila Cañestro, Working With the Earth Itself

Before closing its pages for the summer, the Spanish publication masdearte has spotlighted artist Sheila Cañestro, the latest addition to its running series of profiles of artists it has singled out. The choice extends an encounter that dates back to March 2025, in Paris.

It was at the Colegio de España, the Spanish institution housed within the Cité internationale universitaire de Paris, that the editors first saw her work. Cañestro was showing "Tierra y materia" (Earth and Matter), a body of work rooted in her close relationship with the natural world.

That bond with nature, masdearte notes, underpins her practice: at once a personal refuge and a recurring source of inspiration, landscape feeds an approach centred on material itself — soil, its textures, its states. The title of the Paris exhibition captured the programme in two words, placing ground and substance ahead of representation.

The Colegio de España, founded in the interwar period, has long hosted Spanish artists, researchers and students staying in Paris, and regularly serves as a showcase for contemporary Iberian art in the French capital. Exhibitions held there often provide early international visibility for artists still little seen outside Spain.

By ending its editorial season on this name, masdearte flags a career worth following. Its column of newly "signed" artists, which logs the names its editors have noticed month by month, will resume after the summer break — a period traditionally marked by a slowdown in the European cultural calendar.

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Written by the ADM desk based on masdearte. Read the original article for the full story.