MIREYA MASÓ (Barcelona, 1963)."Untitled.Photography.Size: 124 x 124 cm; 128 x 128 cm (frame).The Catalan artist Mireya Masó trained at the Escola Eina, at the Facultat de Belles Arts de Sant Jordi and at the Facultat de Humanitats de la Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona. Although her work is fundamentally photographic, she denies that she is a photographer: for her photography is a means of expression and not an end in itself. In fact, Masó often sketches her photographs before they are taken; in other words, she subtly "shades" the scenes in the search for a preconceived image. Video is another of his fundamental instruments, which he often integrates with the photographic image in his exhibitions. Since the 2000s, her work has focused on natural settings, something made possible and enriched by the various artist residencies she has enjoyed. Mireya Masó's landscapes are tamed and function as portraits of a human being who, by the way, is always omitted; among the most clearly tamed are an English garden (2000), whose results are reminiscent of British landscape painting with romantic roots, or her work Antarctica: Experiment No. 1 (2006). In this case, and in the face of perhaps the wildest nature he has ever portrayed, he generates images in which artifice and the human gaze before the icebergs is very present: "In art, to carry out any gesture that goes beyond thought, it is inevitable to alter nature; that is why I try to make every act fully justified. Antarctica is the visible presence of change," he says of this work, one of his best known. Her artistic stays include the Centrum Beeldende Kunst of Rotterdam (Rotterdam, Netherlands, 1998); the Stichting Kaus Australis (Rotterdam, Netherlands, 2002); the Intercanvi Rhône-Alpes/Catalunya (France, 1998); the Europees Keramisch Werkcentrum (Den Bosch, Netherlands, 1999); the Delfina Studio Trust Award (London, 2000-2001); and the Base Esperanza (Antarctica, Argentina, 2006). Mireya Masó has had solo exhibitions at the RAM Foundation (Rotterdam, Netherlands, 2003); the Espace des Arts de Colomiers (France, 2002); the Valence Museum (Valence, France, 1999); the Europees Keramisch Werkcentrum (Den Bosch, Netherlands, 1999); the Museu de l'Empordà (Figueres, Barcelona, 2001); the Casa de América (Madrid, 2006); and the Centre d'Art Santa Mònica (Barcelona, 2010).