Carmen Recio is a New York City-based artist and educator. Her work emerges from a lifelong intimacy with gardens—real and remembered—most vividly those of her grandparents in San Antonio, Venezuela. Her grandfather Gilberto Rodriguez a botanist and marine biologist, cultivated a garden that became a playground, sanctuary, and source of early wonder. In this lush environment, Carmen camped, played survival games, built stick teepees, and sipped nectar from wild flowers—rituals that now echo across her paintings.

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Carmen’s artistic practice—spanning painting, printmaking, collage, and sculpture—is rooted in the organic. Repetitive motifs of petals, seeds, and leaves pulse across the surface, creating vibrant, layered ecosystems of color and form. Shapes bloom and retreat, intertwine and shift, suggesting both growth and impermanence. Her work draws from memories of botanical gardens, particularly the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, where she later studied her grandfather’s scientific contributions. These spaces, curated yet alive, suspended in time, mirror the dreamlike, generative quality of her own visual landscapes.​ Through her work, Carmen explores the tension between structure and wildness, memory and presence. Each piece becomes a place—imagined but rooted—where life insists, persists, and reconfigures itself in joyful, unexpected ways.

Carmen Recio graduated from Fordham University at Lincoln Center in 2019 with a Bachelor’s in Visual Arts and English. She has taught at various cultural institutions including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Children's Museum of the Arts. Currently she teaches art at a private school in New York City.

Carmen Recio has shown work with the Audubon Mural Project (2023), Art & Artists in the Hoopskirt Factory (2023), Silvana Boutique Harlem (2022), Studio 9D (2022), One Mile Gallery (2021), New Apostle Gallery (2020), Drawing Rooms (2020), The Artist Essentials (2020), the Children's Museum of the Arts (2019-2020), East New York Studios (2019), Ildiko Butler Gallery (2019) and Susan Lipani Gallery (2018).

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https://www.audubon.org/news/spruce-grouse-carmen-recio

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Contact:

Instagram: @carmenrecioartist

Email: carmenrecio320@gmail.com

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