Mireia Serra

Big Journey (2/8)

2020

Abandoning her well-paying fashion career to pursue sculpture was undoubtedly a courageous and challenging decision for artist Mireia Serra in 1998. 

The Barcelona-born Serra dreamt of making art at a young age but faced pressures from her family to choose a more traditionally stable career path. She completed her studies in fashion design in the mid-1990s and went on to work in lingerie, managing the Intima Cherry, Gemma and Silhouette labels.

Serra subsequently pivoted toward art and began to study sculpture, graduating in 2002 from the Llotja School of Arts. There, where Pablo Picasso and Antoni Gaudí had taken classes before her, Serra specialized in iron and bronze work. Later she expanded upon her technical training with advanced portrait sculpture studies under Jorge Egea at the European Museum of Modern Art.

Serra’s withdrawal from the fashion world was not a complete departure, as she often finds ways to integrate into her figurative sculptures compelling allusions to the work that characterized her prior career. She creates slender human forms perched atop globes or sprawled out on shelves, each of them clad in tasteful albeit monochrome apparel. Their ensembles get meticulous attention — note how the ends of slim-cut pant legs sit on the tops of detailed sneakers or the main compartment of a contemporary backpack is given precise texture as if its exterior is made of quilted lambskin leather.

The 2013 International Art Fair in Madrid was the first solo show for Serra, and she has had multiple exhibitions at art fairs and galleries all over Europe since then. She has been represented by Artspace Warehouse since 2017.

On 1stDibs, find a collection of Mireia Serra sculptures and mixed media works.