Alejandra Morales Garza (b. Monterrey, 1993) is a visual artist working primarily in medium and large-scale paintings made with oil and acrylic.  She received her BA in 2016 from McGill University and studied Art Research at the Autonomous University of Barcelona.  Alejandra recently completed her MFA in Visual Arts at the University of British Columbia and has had multiple collective art shows, including the VI Muestra Iberoamericana de Arte Miniatura y de Pequeño Formato at Museo El Centenario, where one of her pieces received an honourable mention.  In 2023, Alejandra had a solo show in her natal Monterrey, Impaciencia Moderna, at the Faculty of Architecture in the Autonomous University of Nuevo León. 

Her artwork has also been exhibited locally at the Contemporary Art Museum of Monterrey (MARCO), Ciudad Guadalupe Museum, Antiguo Palacio de García Museum, Casa de la Cultura San Pedro, and at Nave Generadores Centro de las Artes; and internationally at Superfine!  and Clio Art Fair in the United States; at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Centre A, Galerie Erga and The Glassdoor Gallery in Canada; and at Piramidón Centre d’Art Contemporani, Cercle Artistic de Sant Lluc, and EINA Barra de Ferro in Spain. 

I paint scenes typically associated with femininity, tenderness, and fragility.  I create fantastical worlds that are distorted and baroque while remaining comforting and aesthetic.  The humorous and ironic undertones of many of my works have led some to refer to them as kitsch.  However, I believe the excessive use of ornamentation can be seen as reflective of life’s negations: clichés that have lost their innocence without spreading wisdom. 

Fundamentally, my artwork explores female sexuality and traditional female ideals of being a housewife and a child bearer.  This is an ideology deeply rooted in my native city of Monterrey, in the conservative North of Mexico.  This vision of success, a narrow, even asphyxiating, idea of fulfillment, is one that I find simultaneously fascinating and repellent.  In my pieces, I typically contemplate these themes through the use of metaphor – principally birds and flowers.  My aim is to use warmth, tonality and humour as a means of ideological expression. 

My artistic process is a never-ending journey of discovering both myself and my surroundings. Whether it is trying to figure out what authenticity means in the radically polarized city that is Monterrey, in its intimate and idiosyncratic art scene, or even at a personal level—I am constantly trying to figure out my own sense of genuineness, only to identify an increasing number of inconsistencies and contradictions. I do not seek to patronize or propagandize. Rather, I aim to confront the viewers with their own underlying desires and lusts, in pieces that never fail to be as subversive as they are comforting.