About

Mauricio Jiménez is a Chilean visual artist whose practice relies on the intersection between anthropological research and intimate artistic experience. Based in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, his work explores the territories where human and animal essences converge through contemporary portraiture and documentary investigation.

Jiménez graduated with highest honors as a Designer from Universidad Finis Terrae in Santiago, Chile (2014), followed by postgraduate studies in Typography and Lettering from the University of Chile (2015) and is currently studying a Diploma in Philosophy and Aesthetics at Universidad Católica de Chile (2025). His academic trajectory shaped his understanding of visual language as a form of cultural translation, having performed as professor in Design Methodology, Research, and Art History (2017-2020).

Through his teaching practice, Jiménez developed what he describes as «reciprocal observation»—the capacity to offer others the depth of contemplating artwork as a collective and political experience.

Central to his practice is his sustained investigation into indigenous visual cultures and their symbolic systems. His anthropological fieldwork has taken him through diverse territories—from Chilean Patagonia to Mongolian steppes—documenting how indigenous cultures articulate their relationship with the natural world through visual language.

He led the collaborative exhibition «Huesos de Bagual» (2017), which presented over 80 photographs of Chilean Patagonia alongside a documentary film that participated in international festivals, with related conferences in Santiago and Valparaíso. That same year, he directed «Luminancia. Cielos del Maipo,» a photographic project exhibited at the Peñalolén Cultural Center, further exploring the dialogue between landscape and collective memory.

His artistic evolution is fundamentally based on geographical displacement, having resided in Leipzig, Germany (2017–2019), San Cristóbal de las Casas, Mexico (2020–2021), and now in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, while developing educational programs, exploring local mural techniques, and conducting photographic experimentation to understand anthropological artistic expression across diverse human ways of living.

In recent years, he has been publishing poetry in specialized magazines in Uruguay and Spain while currently working on a photo-documentary book combining previous artworks with poems. His current artwork, expands arts as ritual response to contemporary crises of identity and ecological disconnection from the perspective of our animal nature, framed within the Diploma in Philosophy and Aesthetics, where he deepens his work to decolonize anthropocentric worldviews on nature and spirituality, offering pathways toward reimagining reciprocal forms of coexistence through a reflective, intuitive and ecological understanding.

Statement

My work begins when what I observe constructs a present and finally honest reality. Thus I witness the subject transit from inside toward outside and vice versa, making the body aware of all that is invisible, leaving it exposed to the complete narrative of the uncertain and brutally real phenomenon of being-here.

Throughout history, the artwork tells me about its culture, its icons and ritual temperature of the epoch, each artist conversing with the truest dimension of sensible experience—that which no book could ever tell me.

In my passage through teaching, I came to know closely the power of interpreting and offering to another the depth of thinking about the work from a reciprocal gaze, that is, to offer the experience and the passage through the vectors that tension technique in the gesture expanded across paper and the silhouettes that declare who lives inside the poet.

It is thus in the face and the pause in the other where I learned to amplify the limit of my own skin to dilute it with the elements and with the limit behind technique. It was first audiovisual, then photography, printmaking, later charcoal that presses light. It is the territory to which belongs the intimacy of recognizing with drawing tools the visual texture and rapid gesture of the human without masks.

I trace in indigenous cultures the features forged by the foundation of all that is known. Documenting their journey meant sinking the eye through Incan crevices, Magellanic plains, Mongolian horses. The fauna written into the human condition. The human and its sacred everyday.

Remaining in detail leads irrevocably to the unfolding and diversity of expressions of the becoming of the soul’s body. It is deep and sustained observation that opens a pencil, a photograph, and a territory alike. These are irrefutable encounters that encapsulate in their tensioned form within the folds, revelations that can only be registered with the language of the work.

It is thus that artistic creation in my work returns to everyday experience the ritual toward the interior that awaits to be recognized and observed from the human toward the animal; from the animal to territory; from territory toward emptiness; from emptiness to the observer.

info(at)maujimenez.com
Whatsapp +49 1523 7209 423
Hülsenbusch, Germany

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