Bio
Lídia Vives is a visual artist and fine art photographer born in Lleida and based in Barcelona. Her work fuses pictorial tradition, symbolic storytelling and contemporary fashion aesthetics, creating images that go beyond visual beauty to reveal hidden layers of meaning.
She is known for hiding secrets in her photographs — enigmatic symbols, subtle narrative details, and recurring elements such as bees. These visual mysteries have become her signature, offering viewers the chance to decode personal and universal themes embedded in each composition.
With influences from Renaissance and Baroque painting, Vives constructs her photographs with meticulous art direction, often integrating custom-made props, mixed media, and self-portraiture. Her imagery balances the timeless and the surreal, evoking a sense of suspended reality.
Her work has been exhibited in museums, galleries, and international art fairs, and featured in publications including Vogue Italia and Esquire. She has collaborated with institutions and brands such as RTVE and Penguin Random House, and her pieces are part of private collections around the world.
Artist Statement
Between the classical and the contemporary
Since childhood, I dreamed of becoming a painter. My father is an artist, and I grew up surrounded by canvases, classic music, and books filled with Renaissance and Baroque imagery. Later, as a teenager, I discovered photography through Henri Cartier-Bresson — and just as camera phones were emerging, I began experimenting with self-portraiture. That moment changed everything. Photography became my way of painting with light.
My work is a reconciliation of two worlds: the classical visual language I inherited, and the modern cultural influences I sought out — fashion, rock music, contemporary aesthetics. I construct timeless scenes that blend pictorial tradition with symbolic storytelling and surreal undertones. Each image is a crafted universe, built to seduce the eye and challenge the mind.
The game of looking
I like to create a dialogue with the viewer — a subtle, visual game. I often hide secrets within my compositions: bees, mirrors, fruits, gestures. These symbolic details invite the audience to look closer, to stay longer. The bee, for example, carries both a personal and historical meaning for me — a memory from my childhood and a nod to the Barberini family, patrons of Baroque artists. I use these visual clues to bridge past and present, reality and fiction.
Most of my works are staged environments: carefully directed scenes using handmade props, self-portraits, and stylized lighting. I don’t tell stories literally. I prefer metaphor, exaggeration, suggestion. Color —especially red— and composition are central to my process. Every object, every element has a place and a reason. My goal is for the aesthetic to captivate first, then lead to something deeper.
The personal as universal
Art is the language that best reflects how I experience the world. Sometimes emotions are too complex to name — and that’s where my work begins. My process is obsessive and immersive: from a vague idea or sketch, I build the set, shape the character, capture the moment, and later transform it through post-production — sometimes digital, sometimes painted by hand.
Even when my works are deeply personal, they speak to broader experiences — the female gaze, the intimate, the symbolic. I believe our individual stories often mirror collective ones. My hope is that my images resonate visually and emotionally — that someone might see one and think: “There’s something here I’ve felt too, even if I couldn’t put it into words.” That’s when a photograph becomes more than an image — it becomes connection.