Aranxa Ortega was born and raised in Veracruz, Mexico. At the age of nineteen she relocated to Houston, TX to pursue higher education. Under the mentorship of artists like Michael Ray Charles and Kelli Vance, she received a BFA in Painting from the University of Houston in December of 2015. Aranxa moved to Paris, France, in the fall of 2016. In the summer of 2020, Aranxa became a recurrent resident artist at 59 Rivoli, a cultural institution in Paris. At present, she paints the renowned Galerie Troubetzkoy and holds her personal studio practice. 

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Her work reflects real or imagined beings and moments, in an attempt to express love, deepen understanding and heal the wounds of the past. Ortega often triggers feelings of nostalgia, sorrow or even anger, in order to transcend these emotions with the purpose of constituting a new visual reality, capturing the essence of the moment and highlighting its inherent beauty. The end result is an uncanny collection of paintings and drawings that serve as memorial monuments in her mind, which inevitably tries to filter the past. There is clarification, there is doubt, there is reconciliation and estrangement, but above all, there is the desire to capture the broad palette of human emotions in all of their confused and fleeting expressions. Ortega is inspired by the forms and colors in nature, the thoughts and mental images of personal experience, and anything that can be imagined.

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Her life mission is to embrace herself, to be in service of all of us going through this journey of healing and self remembrance. Her ‘combinatory’ approach posits her as a child of our times: her work speaks several languages at the same time, somewhat chaotically but, always producing an end result of remarkable beauty and insight.