Albertine Stahl is interested in the artificiality of the images she creates and the narratives they seek to sustain. Stahl began her training in art in El Salvador at the National Arts Center when she was 13 years old. Later, she studied Fine Arts, with an emphasis on painting at the University of El Salvador.
It was during her college education that she won a grant for the “Visions of Art” program, based in Berlin, Germany. In 2016, she was part of the Salvadoran group of artists selected to represent her El Salvador at the X Biennial in Central America, which was held in Costa Rica. She also had her first solo show that same year.“When they explode, lights sublimate us” (Stahl 2019). Her work has appeared in several international art magazines and is also featured in galleries in Nicaragua, as well as private collections in San Salvador, El Salvador, Panama City, San José, Costa Rica, and Colombia.
Stahl describes the work analyzed for this body of work, which some of it was displayed at Zona Maco show in Mexico City as being a combination of trompe l’oeil and invitation. She claims that by tricking the eye of the viewer, it invites them to draw infinite connections, too blur borders, to challenge the spatial limits from one geographical point to another, and to take a virtual trip, an MTV zapping from my home Costa Rica, to the Museum of El Prado. Stahl’s work is a collection of photographs arranged in a trompe l’oeil fashion to truly make the viewer think about how the images included are connected in both the artist’s mind and how they themselves can find connections between and among them. She tends to use a combination of photographs of famous people combined with everyday objects and other images that most people would find unrelated to the person featured. This leads to making the viewer truly have to think about the connection that Stahl finds between the images she presents.
