Paula Vapensiero

Visual artist based in Madrid

Paula Vapensiero has been painting since she can remember. Born in Valladolid, she grew up between the geometric plains of Castile and a family that traveled the world — a formation that left its mark not in any academy, but in the eye: the ability to reduce what is seen to its essential structure.

She is entirely self-taught. No formal training, no art school. What she has instead is twenty years of uninterrupted practice — from the oil paintings she made as a teenager in Valladolid, through a decade of private work developed across Madrid, Milan, Dublin, London and Caracas, to the construction of a coded visual system that now structures her entire output.

That system — the Vapensiero Alphabet — emerged gradually, organically in her paintings from a need that painting alone could not satisfy. Each geometric symbol corresponds to a letter. Each letter, embedded in the painted surface, encodes a word, a phrase, a name. What the viewer reads as abstraction is, underneath, language. Private, precise, irreducible.

Her practice does not represent experience. It encodes it.

The works are built in layers: first the pictorial matter — dense, gestural, driven by colour and the physical urgency of the moment — and then the inscription, the alphabet entering the surface as a second skin. The two systems, painterly and linguistic, are inseparable. Each informs the other. Each conceals the other.

In 2024, Vapensiero completed Vapensiero 366 – 024, the most rigorous work of her career to date: 366 Fujifilm instant photographs, each produced and pictorially intervened on its corresponding day of the year, without exception. Painted across four countries, through grief, travel, and the particular discipline of a self-imposed system, V366 is both the proof of that system and its most complete articulation to date.

CV

Paula Vapensiero
Born in Valladolid, Spain
Based in Madrid, Spain

Group Exhibitions 

2025 — Blue Neon: The End, The Gallery Riviera, Benalmádena, Málaga

2024 — Sin Miedo, Galería de Arte Origen, Madrid

Works in Private Collections Spain, Qatar and Mexico

Practice Self-taught. Has developed an independent coded visual system — the Vapensiero Alphabet — through which her entire practice is articulated. Active practice since 2006.