Maria Morillo is a Colombian-Venezuelan mixed-media portrait artist based in Los Angeles. Her work begins with the human face as a place of encounter a way of recognizing something of ourselves in another.

 

Her ongoing series, The Tree of Life, grew from a desire for connection at a moment when isolation made our shared human experience impossible to ignore. Working with the faces of people she does not know, Morillo became interested in the tension between individuality and belonging: each person entirely singular, yet inevitably connected to a larger human whole.Through portraiture, she explores that invisible network  the instinctive recognition that, despite our different histories, identities, and circumstances, we exist in relation to one another.

 

Morillo builds her portraits through a physical process of fragmentation and reconstruction. Torn paper, oil and acrylic paint, charcoal, textiles, wax, drawing, and exposed surfaces are layered, disrupted, and reassembled. The act of breaking material apart and bringing it together again becomes part of the language of the work: fragments remain visible, yet gradually form a new whole.

 

Her professional background in costume design has also shaped the way she approaches a subject. Years spent constructing characters through color, texture, silhouette, clothing, and detail developed an enduring fascination with people and with the visual clues through which we imagine who someone might be. In her studio practice, that same instinct moves into the portrait, where the face becomes the beginning of an imagined story rather than its conclusion.

 

Across her work, Morillo considers identity as both deeply individual and inherently connected — something assembled through experience, memory, material, and our relationship to others.