Sofia Maldonado’s paintings, drawings, murals, installations, and painted objects are informed by an urban sensibility that draws inspiration from aspects of street and youth culture, fashion and commercial design, public art, abstraction and pop art, identity politics, and post-feminist art practice. Maldonado’s work first bursts onto the local art scene in Puerto Rico in the early 2000s through her imaginative and distinct pasquines and murals adorning the dilapidated walls of abandoned storefronts and buildings in Old San Juan and elsewhere throughout the City. Her colorful liquidity pop abstractions often populated by a highly stylized cast of ultra feminine super heroines with Rapunzel-like tresses that cascade like ribbons evincing the Caribbean’s lush foliage immediately set her apart from other street artists.

And, while Maldonado’s practice exudes the raw energy and urgency that exemplifies urban art, her practice more accurately reflects a hybrid interplay between traditional fine art, popular and vernacular art forms spanning such myriad sources as Latin Hip Hop, ragaetón, African tribal art, Japanese anime characters, skateboard culture, punk music, globalbased street and graffiti art, recent developments in the history of painting, and the traditional genre of landscape painting.

—Marysol

Nieves, from sofiamaldonado.com