Musician Arca Debuts 'Nightmarish' Painting Series at ICA London to Combat Career Burnout

Iconoclastic musician Arca opens her first art exhibition, using "frenzied" painting to process trauma and overcome burnout after a decade in music.

By: AXL Media

Published: Apr 6, 2026, 1:35 PM EDT

Source: Information for this report was sourced from The Guardian

From Digital Origins to Physical Impasto

Long before her "Kick" pentalogy and collaborations with Björk, Alejandra Ghersi was a teenager in Caracas uploading 3D animations to DeviantArt. This early interest in visual media has come full circle with her first solo institutional exhibition at the ICA in London. Shifting from the digital to the tactile, Ghersi now employs a heavy "graffitied impasto" technique, layering canvases with oils, acrylics, melted plastic, latex, and glitter to create "nightmarish" figures that include gurning clowns and wide-eyed demons.

Healing Through Artistic Burnout

The transition to painting served as a response to the "burnout" Ghersi experienced after a meteoric ten-year run in the music industry. The artist admitted to falling out of love with music and struggling to begin a new record. Unlike the digital recording process, where files can be overwritten or deleted, Ghersi found the physical medium offered a "raw" experience with no "delete button." This permanent nature of painting allowed her to reconnect with the creative enthusiasm she possessed at the start of her career.

Processing Violence on Canvas

The works, collectively titled "Angels," were produced in a "frenzy" within the communal yard of her residence in Barcelona. The creative process was visceral, involving the melting of plastic onto surfaces and even stabbing materials with a knife. Ghersi describes the sessions as a way of "processing different violences" she had survived and previously compartmentalized. Having undergone a decade of Jungian psychoanalysis, she concluded that certain understandings are reached through feeling rather than language.