Dani Iribe

California native, Dani Iribe uses her practice as a tool to dissect and uncover layers of human emotion. The Afro-Latina portrait painter highlights the merging of cultures and identities that take place in her everyday life with amalgamations of both subtle and maximalist motifs of Guatemalan and Black American history, culture, and spiritualism.

Heavily inspired by the 19 th century symbolism movement, Dani’s artwork exposes its own truth and reality through collections of metaphoric imagery and motifs. Themes are embodied by intense chroma and collage of patterns, all of which act as tools to summon raw maximal feelings. By conjuring these emotions, Iribe believes it grants her forms of liberty and power. She describes this liberation as the ability to release or the expression of suppressed emotions-Expression through disruption is how she provides license for herself.

Crowded spaces, feverish palettes, and collections of iconographies are conceptions she calls upon to reveal the bliss that sometimes hides in consumingly profound emotion. The coalescence of congested ideas and visuals directly convey sentiments of unease and what Dani refers to as a ‘fraudulent relief’. This fraudulent relief being the ability she possesses to tether herself back to an idea or emotion once she thinks she has escaped it.