Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Drawing, sculpture, installation
Website: anthonymeier.com
Rosana Castrillo Díaz was born in 1971 in Sama de Langreo, Asturias, Spain. She earned a BFA from the Facultad de Bellas Artes at the Universidad Complutense in Madrid in 1993, a second BFA from the Cleveland Institute of Art in 1996, a Post-Baccalaureate certificate from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in 1999, and an MFA from Mills College in Oakland in 2003. She has lived and worked in San Francisco since the early 2000s.
Castrillo Díaz received the SECA Art Award from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2004, the Jay DeFeo Merit Award from Mills College in 2003, and the Artadia Art Award for the San Francisco Bay Area in 2005. Her SECA recognition led to a series of institutional commissions in the Bay Area, including a mural at UCSF’s Mission Bay campus in 2007 and a large mica-paint mural on the bridge leading to SFMOMA’s Rooftop Garden in 2009. Her work has since entered the collections of SFMOMA, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, and the Mills College Art Museum, and she has shown with Anthony Meier Fine Arts in San Francisco and Miles McEnery Gallery (formerly Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe) in New York.
Castrillo Díaz works in graphite drawing, wall relief, and installation, favoring modest, often discarded materials — looped Scotch tape, twisted and layered paper, mica dust, rubber bands, notebook spines — that she renders with exacting, near-obsessive precision. Her drawings and wall pieces are intentionally quiet and easy to overlook at a distance, rewarding close, sustained looking; she has described her interest as being “in quiet, in simplicity, and in the kind of space that is in the periphery and is not quite there.”
Working almost entirely in white, gray, and other muted, monochromatic values, she treats light itself as a subject: mica dusted onto paper or paint catches and shifts with the viewer’s position, and veil-like installations of layered tape or paper hover at the edge of visibility. Her large-scale murals and installations function as compositional scores that can be reinstalled by other hands while preserving the original intent, extending a practice rooted in small-scale, intimate drawing into architectural space.
This entry was written by the Bay Area Artist Wiki project and is based on publicly available information.
Claim this page → to update your own profile.