Patricia Villalobos Echeverría (1965) is an American-born Nicaraguan visual artist and educator of Salvadoran descent whose work spans printmaking, installation, video, sculpture, photography, and socially-engaged art.
In a review of De lo que soy/Of What I Am, a survey exhibition of contemporary self-portraiture by 22 women of Latin American or Caribbean descent, The New York Times art critic Holland Cotter writes: "In Patricia Villalobos Echeverria's photographic 'Terremotto-Earthquake Series,' the artist's face appears, but only as a half-obscured symbolic element.
Art historian and critic Kristina Olson describes the 2005 installation Hoverings as involving "two videos projected from opposite corners of a gallery onto a suspended, white, two-lobed orb made of EPS foam."
[8] In reference to this ongoing series of site-specific installations, Cornejo states that Villalobos Echeverría "continues to explore the dual nature of the self" and that "she uses actual spaces of intervention, military language, and physical coordinates to connect her own subjectivities with current global visualities, evoking the specter of war.
In this case, the artist intervened the façade and interior of the Centro Contemporáneo Wilfredo Lam in Havana, Cuba with hundredths of EPS foam sculptures combined with a sound component.
This work "takes on limitless resonances in the Cuban context," writes art critic and curator Clara Astiasarán, "for it emerges as/appears in a tacitly harmless form, but its effects provoke suspicious thought and/or action in the face of the unknown."
She describes the work as a series of protuberances that arise out of the pink-painted wall, "taking capricious but essentially ovoid forms, whose 'aestheticity' and their flirtatiousness toward feminine and/or maternal signs, conceal the violence of their invasiveness."
The conceptual language of printmaking continues to be at the core of Villalobos Echeverría's practice, such as the doubling in the Marea series, the replication of sculptural forms in site-specific installations, and ideas of dissemination and exchange in socially-engaged projects.