Donna Torres - The Radiance of Proximity

October 18, 2023 - March 3, 2024 Gate D31 Gallery, North Terminal, Concourse D “What is it about a path that draws us in?

How can we look at a cloud and see something more?

How do we move about in the natural world and feel its proximity?”

MIA Galleries is pleased to present the work of Donna Torres, whose paintings and drawings are influenced by the natural world. Medicinal plants, shamanism, and Indigenous cultures have long informed her art practice, which includes rigorous study and research.

Torres has traveled extensively for the past 50 years exploring, observing, and documenting plants used in healing the body and the mind and their cultural interconnectedness to the people and communities past and present that have used them.

The Radiance of Proximity links the artist’s journeys and experiences with different plants, places, and cultures. The exhibition consists of colorful oil paintings and meticulously drawn graphite works on paper produced between 2004 and the present and includes references to important early female plant explorers and healers who have inspired her. The pieces are complex and layered with meaning through the juxtaposition of disparate environments, objects, and things. Torres’s work reflects her acute observation and attention to detail. They also impart a very personal and almost reverent approach to the places and things she chooses to feature in her work.

The Seer, 2022, graphite on paper, 46 x 26 in.

For María Sabina, the woman who swims in the sacred. 2020, graphite on paper, 46 x 60 in.

Torres’s work takes us beyond the surface of places, healing plants and fungi. Visitors will see a melding of magical scenes—a Miami cityscape with chrysalises hatching into native South Florida butterflies; tropical plant life amongst the arid desert of the Atacama in northern Chile; dreamlike interior spaces in proximity to underwater creatures; and rock art motifs suspended in the atmosphere.

This collection of works, teeming with symbolism and sentiment, inspires viewers to observe intently, delight in both unfamiliar and recognizable environments, and appreciate the extraordinarily imaginative ways the artist captures the natural world around us. Torres unearths stories that, as she notes, “are real and the stuff of hopes and dreams.”

Artist Biography Donna Torres is a Canadian-born artist, botanical illustrator, and textile designer.

Working primarily in paintings and drawings, Torres’s work centers on the relationship of people, plants, and culture. Torres received her BFA in Painting and an MFA in Painting and Drawing at Florida International University. She recently retired as an adjunct professor at Florida International University and from teaching botanical illustration at Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden’s Education Department in Miami, Florida. She has participated in numerous group and solo exhibitions locally, nationally, and internationally. Recent group shows include Chamanismo, Museo Chileno de Arte Precolombino in Santiago, Chile (2022), Ecopharma, La Pared Arte Contemporáneo in Pereira, Colombia (2022), and her most recent solo exhibition Caminos y Enlaces was held at Sala Gasco Arte Contemporáneo, in Santiago, Chile (2023). She was a recipient of an American Society of Botanical Artists grant to teach botanical illustration to the Indigenous Peoples of San Pedro de Atacama, Chile, in 2004 and was awarded the Corral & Cathers Artist Fund at the Coral Gables Community Foundation in 2023. Her paintings and drawings are included in public and private collections, and her botanical artworks have been published in numerous books. Torres lives and works in Miami, Florida.

On this page: Chrysalis, 2020, oil on canvas, 48 x 25 in.

Left: The Gardener’s Dream, 2021, oil on canvas, 28 x 38 in.

Front Cover: Distant Wanders, Close Enchantments, 2020, oil on canvas, 22 x 36 in.

Back Cover: Dreaming the Desert, 2012, oil on canvas, 30 x 40 in.

Scan for more information