Beatriz Cortez

Beatriz Cortez was born in San Salvador in 1970 and lives and works in Los Angeles. 

An essential aspect of Beatriz Cortez’s work is the experience of simultaneity, which she explores through her own personal experience. The artist navigates different temporalities and ways of being: moving between cultures, inhabiting two places at once, and shifting between simple technologies and access to highly complex processes. Cortez primarily works with large volumes of raw metal to give her sculptures a monumental presence while creating forms that can be grasped at a glance. Her work explores themes of memory, movement, and migration. For Cortez, memory is not fixed but exists as an ongoing process of transformation, and her sculptures become metaphors for this movement.  

During her residency at Atelier Calder, Cortez created a sculpture made from steel tubes that were cut and reassembled, giving the material the appearance of being easily malleable. This effect emerged through an experimental and artistic process, in which the artist pushed the limits of the material. The monumental work represents an imaginary construction of the Ilopango Volcano in El Salvador, located near the capital. Its violent eruption, which occurred between the fifth and sixth centuries, is believed to have contributed to the phenomenon known as “Tierra Blanca Joven” and to the disappearance of part of the Maya civilization. This project is part of a broader collaborative research initiative and is intended to travel across different landscapes and continents.