As a young art student in Mendoza in the foothills of the Andes in Argentina, Carmen Gracia originally studied painting and sculpture. At twenty-five she left for Paris and worked with S.W. Hayter and Atelier 17. She learned Hayter’s technical methods of soft ground textures contrasted by deep etching printed in one colour, then overlaid by relief printing in another, and his creation of new shapes by stencils. She visited London, Lisbon and Oslo, finally settling in England in 1969.<br> <br> Her enchantingly direct imagery has certain disconcertingly surrealistic characteristics, especially in her unexpected juxtapositioning where an eye or a star can be in conjunction with a fish or an elephant to jolt the viewer into a new and illogical reality, having a purely visual justification. <br> <br> Carmen has participated in over one hundred and eighty group exhibitions widely spread across the world including Australia, Canada, Finland, France, Germany, Japan, USA and Sweden. She has prints in museums and public collections across the world.<br>
