fiorella podesta | about
STATEMent
Every meaningful transformation begins long before it becomes visible.
Every city, every idea, every shift in our lives first exists as a possibility. I believe creating is one of the most deeply human and perhaps divine things we do.
Through painting, I transform thoughts, ideas, experiences, and emotions into something we can see, share, and understand.
Since I was a child, I have experienced the world through images. I searched for a magical pencil that could bring my drawings to life. Today, I understand the magic was never in the pencil.
It lives in our ability to imagine possibilities before they become reality.
My work explores imagination, nature, and the infinite possibilities that exist before every new reality takes shape.
I call this practice Painting Possibilities.
biography
Fiorella Podestá is a Chilean-American artist and muralist based in South Florida.
For more than twenty-five years, her work has explored the relationship between imagination, nature, and the unseen possibilities that shape our lives through painting, murals, and public art.
Born in Santiago, Chile, Podestá began drawing at the age of seven and started painting in oils at fifteen. She later received a scholarship to study Fine Arts at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, where she developed the foundations of her artistic practice. During her early career, she exhibited her work in galleries and cultural institutions, including Palacio Cousiño, received the FONDART Regional Grant, and created a multidisciplinary project that toured the region.
Moving from Santiago the Capital of Chile to the Mountains, living in the Elqui Valley and traveling throughout South America profoundly influenced her artistic vision, inspiring a visual language rooted in imagination, color, Indigenous cultures, and the natural world.
In 2003, while traveling with her two children to Florence, Italy to continue her artistic studies, Podestá settled in Miami, where her artistic journey took an unexpected new direction. She began exhibiting and selling her paintings while becoming part of the city's emerging contemporary art scene. As Miami's Wynwood Arts District emerged alongside the growing influence of Art Basel Miami Beach and the transformation of Wynwood into an international arts district, her practice expanded beyond the canvas. Invited to create large-scale murals during Art Basel Week for six consecutive years, including projects with Bushwick Collective and Meeting of Styles, she discovered the power of creating art at a public scale.
Since then, public art has become an essential part of her practice. Her murals transform shared spaces into places of curiosity, connection, and imagination, extending the dialogue between artwork and viewer beyond the gallery walls.
Podestá's work has been exhibited throughout the United States, Canada, Spain, Australia, Brazil, Argentina, and Chile, and is held in private collections worldwide. She has collaborated and exhibited alongside internationally recognized artists, including Alex Grey, and her public murals can be found across the United States, Canada, Brazil, Chile, and Spain.
Today, her work explores the relationship between imagination, consciousness, and nature, inviting us to look beyond what is, and discover what else might be possible
"Every possibility begins in the imagination. Art is how I make it visible"