Hidden Garden Art Gallery

Costa Rican artist, Barbara Odio Yglesias began her career in the Department of Bellas Artes at the University of Costa Rica, and developed her artistic vision while painting and working with clay in the rainforests of Costa Rica.

For 16 years she lived in the Osa Peninsula, on the Pacific southwest coast of Costa Rica (1984-2000), where the wild flora and fauna inspired her colorful early paintings. A series of acrylic paintings, Visions of the Rainforest, reflected her immersion in the rainforest and the rural life of the Osa. The next period in her artistic development emerged in the volcanic landscape of Lake Arenal, where she produced a series of paintings entitled Rebirths. In those oil-based paintings she explored the female psyche by re-inscribing icons such as the moon, serpent and flower, to recapture their power and emancipate the "New Woman" as well as herself.

In 2010, Odio Yglesias embarked on a new artist endeavor adding sand to her technique of clay painting. This began in the Osa Peninsula in 1998 with the series entitled "Precolumbian Iconographies." In this series she combineed Precolumbian art iconography with elemental shapes and pigments as a counter discourse to the rush toward a predictable and progress-based modernity and urban life of asphalt found in San Jose today