Natalia Lumbreras

Natalia Lumbreras trained as a fashion and textile designer in London. From very early on, her practice leaned more toward the poetry of the material than the demands of the fashion system. She chose silk not for its luxury, but for its life: for how it breathes, moves, and transforms color into something luminous and constantly changing. After studying at the Heatherley School of Fine Art and graduating in 1991 from Saint Martin’s College of Art and Design, she trained at the Ian & Marcel Atelier, where she began painting directly on silk. The gesture of applying color to a living surface became the foundation of a practice that, more than three decades later, continues to blur the boundaries between art, design, and craft. In 1992 she founded her own studio, from which she began producing limited editions of hand-painted or screen-printed silk scarves, as well as textile pieces with an artistic focus. Between 2001 and 2006 she had a store in Madrid, traveling to present her work at fashion salons in Paris and building relationships with clients in Japan, New York, and Paris. Her work, however, was never tied to fashion as trend, but to an artistic path in constant evolution and in ongoing sensory and temporal exploration. Over the years she has collaborated with choreographers, designers, and interior decorators, and has also taught textile and fashion design at the Istituto Europeo di Design. A trip to Gujarat, India, in 1996 marked a turning point in her relationship with manual craftsmanship. There she learned traditional dyeing and embroidery techniques from nomadic communities near Pakistan. In 2009 she deepened her understanding of artisanal prêt-à-porter production in New Delhi. These experiences with ancestral knowledge continue to inform her visual language, as do the years she spent apprenticing with the painter Monique de Roux (2009–2011) and with the painter and writer Jorge Castillo (2016–2018). Thanks to them, she expanded her practice into drawing and oil painting, while never abandoning intuition and gesture as fundamental principles.

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