Maria Hernandez was born in Bueno Aires, Argentina. She attended Art College where she studied painting and graphic design. After graduating from college, she moved to New York, where she began studying art, and then returned to Argentina in 1985 to open her studio. Over the next 20 years, she worked in many cities in Argentina, Brazil, Spain and Italy.

I love to draw everything I see, and I find inspiration in nature, in people, in flowers, in everything that surrounds me. I always tried to draw when I was inspired, because I like how it calms me down.
When I draw, I try to get everything, even the smallest details that I can't see until I draw. That's why I like to draw with a pencil, because it gives me more complete control over my works.

What are your favorite colors? What techniques do you prefer? What do you draw on? What is your favorite drawing material?
I love all techniques, but most of all I like pastels and gouache. I prefer cool colors in pastels, and I paint mainly dark colors with gouache.
It all depends on the inspiration I'm getting at the moment. I think my favorite material is pastels, because pastels can convey all the nuances of color and make it very expressive.

Why are you called the heiress of Latin American modernist artists?
In my opinion, you inherited their ability to synthesize.
— I think it's a very strange coincidence. In fact, I don't think I can be the heir to their traditions. It's just that my parents were fond of art and I grew up in the art quarter of the city.

What other artists have been inspirational to you in your work?

Artists that respond to their environment and produce work that invades space in a monumental manner are very instructive to me. Cornelia Parker, Judy Pfaff, and Michelle Segre are artists that are somewhere between painting and sculpture but achieve great success in articulating their intelligent missives.

What can you tell us your work is about and a bit about your creative process?

For me, there is solace in the geometry of fundamentals, and in a practice that focuses on the ephemeral nature of paper and the ease of its transportability, which allows me to create large scale constructions. Working in components, I can build very large installations that are multilayered, and can significantly project outwards. Frequently, I will weave in mathematical systems like Pi and the Golden Section in a hexadecimal format. but I attempt to partly obscure the written content, by painting and slicing into the letters, integrating them into the overall structure of the piece. These paper constructions combine digitally printed, hand and laser cut geometric shapes that are painted, sprayed, scraped and gouged. Incorporated into these paper, polystyrene and Mylar sections are glitter, paint, modeling paste, gold leaf, printed commercial matter and recycled paper pulp forms.