Carmen Reina

Carmen Reina is a Spanish illustrator and graphic designer based in Berlin. With a love for dance, body expression and rhythm, Carmen illustrates figures of superhuman plasticity and extreme body expression, and who are not afraid to occupy the space around them.

After moving to Berlin in 2011, she became increasingly interested in graphic design, later studying Visual Communication at the University of the Arts, which gave her a great framework and freedom to explore and develop her own style. Although she was specialising in typography, Carmen spent a lot of time in the silkscreen studio of the University printing her own illustrations.

As a practised swing dancer, she aspires to illustrate as she dances, and dance as she illustrates. Carmen has been dancing swing for many years, and is now furthering her repertoire through contemporary dance and Afrohouse, thus inserting a new visual vocabulary into her work.

“My characters know you are looking at them, and they look right back at you” explains the artist. This awareness is something that Carmen has experienced through the world of social dancing, festivals and competitions, which often come together with an explosion of emotions that she finds addictive. “Because sometimes, life’s not about dancing as if no one is watching, but more about dancing as if everyone is actually doing it” she continues.

Carmen first discovered Risography through the studio drucken3000 in Berlin. Her she became fascinated by the high number of copies the machine could print in seconds, and the fact that each print would still differ from the previous. In her latest series, she combines Risography with hand drawn interventions, where every print not only tells a unique story, but also becomes a unique work of art. 

The project Angry Series comes from Carmen’s frustration with normative femininity, and “the fact that sometimes, the system wants to make us believe that the anger we feel for many political issues is the same as hate. It’s not“. She created this series as a way to therapeutically process her anger around issues like self expression, fem expression, and to reject a representation of femininity that relies on beauty standards and vulnerable attitudes.

These are uncertain times, and Carmen is missing the excitement of a jam circle, the crazy dancers under the spotlight, and a jazz band in full swing. Until then, she will keep practising at home, learning new moves and drawing as much as she can. She dreams of building her own mini silkscreen studio to make small batches of prints and t-shirts at home.

www.carmen-reina.com
@carmen.reina_

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