Ana
Masias

Ana Masías (Ancash, Peru, October 22, 1987) is a Peruvian visual artist.

Her early years were spent between Lima, Peru, and Mexico (1992-2001), specifically between Mexico City and Mérida, Yucatán, in an environment marked by the coexistence of different Latin American cultural traditions and the intense academic and intellectual life of her parents. Ana is the daughter of Ana Bendezú, a psychologist, university professor, and researcher specializing in human sexuality, and Rodolfo Masías, a political scientist, sociologist, and university professor. Both completed their undergraduate studies at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú (PUCP) and postgraduate studies at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences (FLACSO), and El Colegio de México.

Growing up in an environment of intellectual debate, reading, and reflection on social phenomena awakened an early interest in visual culture, history, and artistic expressions, which would later converge in her training as an artist. Upon returning to Peru, she began her academic education at PUCP, studying in the faculties of General Studies Letters and Art and Design. During those years, she developed a practice that combined pictorial production with an interest in research, a relationship she would later consolidate through a Master's degree in Art History and Curatorial Studies (PUCP).

Following a relationship that began in 2014, she married the renowned Peruvian painter José Tola (1943-2019) in 2019. His influence provided her with the technical tools and necessary experience to define her path as a painter.

Ana Masías's work develops in the field of contemporary painting and is characterized by a constant dialogue between artistic practice and research. Her production incorporates references to memory, identity, the representation of the body, the cultural history of the Global South, and the processes of symbolic construction, establishing links between personal experience and collective imaginaries. Her painting explores the human consequences of contemporary violence, war, forced displacement, exile, and loss, addressing these themes from a perspective centered on the human experience rather than specific historical events. Her work proposes a narrative painting where the human figure occupies a central place as a vehicle to represent vulnerability, memory, and resistance. Through scenes of a symbolic nature and compositions constructed from imagination, her works establish relationships between individual experiences and conflicts that transcend national borders, taking contemporary humanitarian crises and the effects of war in different geopolitical contexts as references. Her training has influenced a working methodology in which theoretical reflection and pictorial production develop in parallel.

Her interest in the history of Latin American art is also evident in her academic research. Her Master's thesis, dedicated to the work of Mexican artist Enrique Chagoya, studies the relationship between iconography, historical memory, and decolonial aesthetics—interests that dialogue with her own artistic practice through the incorporation of cultural references, symbolic appropriations, and reflections on the construction of Latin American identity.