Born in 1973 in Caracas, Venezuela.
Resides and works in Sydney, Australia.
Marisabel Gonzalez is a Latin American contemporary artist whose work reflects the complexity of being human. Her practice grows out of her lived experiences as both a doctor and a sonographer, bringing together the emotional interior of memory with the clinical lens she developed in medicine. This way of seeing has formed a visual language that is both tender and precise, guided by her understanding that the body carries our stories in ways that are both visible and hidden.
Her paintings return to ideas of connection, healing, and shared humanity. She begins with the body and allows colour, gesture, and texture to lead toward something universal. Layers of paint, stitched threads, bandages, and fragments of text echo the processes of mending and transformation. Ultrasound textures and the idea of palimpsest appear throughout her work, underscoring her interest in surfaces where earlier marks remain as quiet traces of a lived history.
Marisabel has presented solo exhibitions at Hake House in Sydney (2023 and 2024), Curl Curl Creative Space in Sydney (2020), and Arianne Paffrath in Düsseldorf (2017). Her work has been included in group exhibitions at the Parliament House of NSW and the Manly Art Gallery and Museum in Sydney (2019), as well as at ASD in Den Haag (2017), among others.
Her recent recognition includes finalist selections for the Paddington Art Prize (2021), the Northern Beaches Environmental Art Prize (2024 and 2025), and the St. Columba’s Art Prize (2025). She won the Collabor8 Women’s Art Prize (2023) and was selected as a semi-finalist for the Luca Biennale Cartasia in Italy (2024). Her work is held in public and private collections, including Barclays Private Bank in Sydney, the Stiftung Kleine Kunstdialog West/Ost in Düsseldorf, and the Axicorp Corporate Collections in Singapore and London, as well as private collections worldwide.
Marisabel is represented by Hake House in Sydney, Australia.
Statement
I have always seen myself as a storyteller. My work grows out of the belief that the human body carries our histories, our wounds, and our resilience in ways that go far beyond the surface. My years in medicine shaped how I see. They taught me to read the body through texture, movement, and the quiet information held within an image. Over time, this way of seeing moved into my painting practice and became a language of its own.
I think of myself as a painter of the human essence. My work is less about anatomy and more about what sits beneath it. Memory, migration, motherhood, and the effort to understand who we are and how we connect to one another. These ideas continue to guide me.
I build my paintings through layers. Paint, thread, bandages, fragments of paper, and the soft grain of ultrasound textures form traces of a story that has been rewritten many times. I return to the idea of the palimpsest because it mirrors how our lives accumulate. We carry what came before. We revise. We mend. And yet earlier marks remain, sometimes visible, sometimes only felt.
The studio is where I process the complexity of being human. Colour allows things that feel unsayable to become tangible. Gesture holds memory. Texture becomes a form of repair. My paintings are personal, but they are also meant to create space for others to recognise something of their own story.
In recent years, I have come to see art as a kind of prescription, not in a clinical sense, but as a way of slowing down, noticing, and reconnecting with the emotional landscape of our lives.
My work acknowledges the shared threads of experience that link us. Our vulnerability. Our strength. The histories we carry. I paint to understand these connections and to honour the quiet, persistent resilience of the human spirit.