Simona Schaffer

FEATURED ARTIST | SIMONA SCHAFFER @simonaischaffer 🇲🇽 Simona Schaffer’s work explores the emotional landscape of contemporary cities — places where anonymity, memory, vulnerability, and human connection coexist. Born in Mexico City and now based in Barcelona, the artist transforms familiar urban scenes into spaces of reflection, inviting viewers to look more carefully at the people and gestures often overlooked in everyday life. Working with oil paint, encaustic, collage, and found materials, Schaffer builds richly layered surfaces where painting becomes almost sculptural. Her works combine raw texture, fragments of daily life, and expressive color to create visual environments suspended between memory and reality. In pieces such as Lisbon, the city emerges less as a physical location than as an emotional atmosphere. Within her Shopping Cart series, Schaffer employs the shopping cart as a powerful visual motif through which to examine displacement, survival, visibility, and belonging. In the installation Who Pushes the Cart, painted figures surround a physical cart, bringing marginalized experiences into public view and inviting reflection on the social realities that shape contemporary cities. Works such as People, Subway Passengers, Migrant, and Awaiting Nightfall focus on moments of quiet human presence within public space. Through these layered compositions, the artist reveals the tension between solitude and belonging, reminding us that even the briefest encounters contribute to the emotional architecture of urban life. Ultimately, Simona Schaffer’s practice invites us to rediscover the emotional depth hidden within ordinary life. Through fragile figures and deeply human urban scenes, her work reminds us that even within the noise and fragmentation of the contemporary city, moments of dignity, empathy, and connection still remain. Curated by AGC - Art Global Contemporain