Ximena Castro is a Mexican interdisciplinary artist, self-taught painter and songwriter whose work explores the relationships between body, memory, identity and power. Working across painting, music and writing, her practice examines how bodies, histories and political narratives are represented, controlled and remembered.

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As a self-taught painter, Castro has developed a visual practice centered on the female body and its de-sexualization. Her paintings challenge the ways in which women’s bodies have historically been transformed into objects of desire, judgment, censorship and consumption.

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Rather than removing the nude from view, Castro questions the gaze itself. She approaches the female body as a political territory: a body capable of existing without performing for the viewer, and a space from which to examine autonomy, representation, identity and power.

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Castro developed her pictorial language through independent practice and continuous experimentation, later complementing this path with painting studies at the Academia de San Carlos in Mexico City. Her background in law has also shaped the way she approaches questions of justice, power and the structures that regulate both individual and collective life.

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Her interdisciplinary practice extends into music and songwriting, moving between the personal and the political. Her songs address love, memory and identity alongside war, migration, imperialism, inequality and contemporary social conflicts around the world.

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She is the author and songwriter of “Manos Blancas,” a song against imperialism and war that has surpassed 20 million streams worldwide. Widely circulated across digital platforms and social media, Manos Blancas has become a contemporary anthem of Latin American resistance, bringing her exploration of memory, violence and power to an international audience.

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Although painting, music and writing operate through different languages, they emerge from many of the same questions: Who controls the narrative? Who decides how a body should be seen? Whose bodies bear the consequences of power? Whose stories are remembered—and whose are erased?

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Beyond the studio, Castro’s long-standing relationship with cooking and food culture has shaped another dimension of her understanding of territory, cultural memory and collective experience.

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Across disciplines, a common impulse runs through her work: to create art that is willing to make us uncomfortable. Art that questions inherited narratives, confronts structures of power and asks the viewer not only to look or listen, but to reconsider the position from which they do so.

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Exhibitions, Artwork & Commissions

For exhibitions, artwork acquisitions, commissioned artworks, curatorial collaborations and press inquiries, please get in touch

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