Ana Elens Garuz
Bio
Ana Elena Garuz (Panama, 1971) is a visual artist whose practice centers on abstract painting, expanding into collage, drawing, and sculptural forms as tools for observation and reconfiguration. She studied Fine Arts at the Savannah College of Art and Design and earned a Master’s degree in Art with a focus on painting from New York University.
Her work draws from everyday fragments, which she methodically classifies and reorganizes. Through minimal gestures and modest materials, Garuz constructs compositions that reveal hidden connections between structure and intimacy. What once seemed trivial becomes rhythm, memory, and form. Her approach to pictorial space moves between the two-dimensional and the object-based, anchored in abstraction, minimalism, and a quiet poetics of the essential.
She has participated in solo and group exhibitions in Panama, Latin America, and the United States. Garuz lives and works in Panama City, where she continues to develop a rigorous practice that transforms the ordinary into a refined and eloquent visual language.
Statement
I conceive my work as a tool for observation and contemplation of geometric abstraction and the ever-changing landscape of Panama City. I deconstruct collected images and use everyday materials to explore their two-dimensional and sculptural possibilities. These elements come together in compositions that engage with minimalist art, art history, contemporary design, urban life, and personal memory.
Through geometric harmonies, I reinterpret the language of collage, the fragmentation of contemporary imagery, and principles of Constructivism, layering forms like pieces of a puzzle. In my process, I subject magazine clippings to a rigorous exercise of classification, recombination, and interpretation, generating new relationships between geometries, patterns, and textures. This act of editing reveals unexpected associations, shifting perception and proposing a typological system of my own.
