Artist
Catherine Parra is a French artist, residing and working in Barcelona.
One day she stumbled with amazement upon a monumental work featuring a page from a notebook, its lines filled with calligraphic characters, some of them crossed out. The sheer enormity of the piece, the words and their corrections, visible but openly accepted errors, inspired her first paintings.
While starting her career in the creative branch of a big communication agency, she further experimented with sculpture, collage, interior decoration and furniture restoration.
Her desire to give life to shapes and figures drove her to study textiles.
One day she decided to make handbags out of army blankets. It was the starting point of a collection which was focused on objects and materials that she diverted from their original function, such as blankets, coffee bags or vintage corsets…
Design and decoration shops immediately fell in love with her creations.
Catherine collaborated for a few seasons with these boutiques, producing colourful and offbeat collections, and then in 2000 she finally launched her own brand, Catherine Parra.
At the beginning of the year 2000 she moved to Barcelona, and created lively and playful shoe collections, with customized colours and prints.
She then gradually turned to painting in her collections, first using acrylic paint on shoes, then on bags, while slowly developing a truly abstract style. Painting her creations became her very own trademark, making each piece a unique work of art.
In the 17 years that followed, her creations acquired an authentic artistic approach, which was the fruit of her research and her mixed media explorations with shapes, colours, mixtures and materials. Her use of innovative and avant-garde techniques helped her to steer clear of outside influences and to maintain her own timeless style.
Today Catherine devotes herself exclusively to painting, and her works are to be found in numerous private collections.