The work of Maite Ibarreche is rich in references to the history of thought, art history and the representation of the body in the contemporary world. It conjugates particular talents: her work, of impeccable technique, feeds of a natural and intellectual interest on the contemporary culture. She combines her artistic work with projects of curatorship and research, which boosts her work with conceptual depth. Among her interests is the research of the Enlightenment age and exploring the gaps between the reason of the Enlightenment and the problems of representa- tion in contemporary culture.

Her new work revolves around Western pornog- raphy and the Shunga tradition, or the erotic Japanese "pillow" books of the Edo period (1603-1867). Erotic photography displaced the Shunga tradition in the Meiji era, but it is reborn as an artistic form in her work.

Ibarreche defines herself as a multidisciplinary artist interested in generating new readings about narratives and cultural texts. Attempts to unveil the contradictions in contemporary culture, is interested in the dialogue between opposites, or the tension between dichotomies that society cannot solve. This is the case of the divergences between the legal facts that legiti- mize prostitution and the social sanction on pornography. She defines it as the divergence between codes of acceptable behavior and representations of women. Maite says: "We start from the principle that art, like all forms of experience, is a search for the understanding of the world, matter and time; it is an exercise that seeks to unfold its components and fragment the compact way in which these present themselves, to find its essence and take it as a restructuring unit. "

Her work contributes an important ingredient to the borders of individual freedom, today in shock against the walls of dogmatism. The diversity of media she uses, such as watercolor, drawing and collage, produce a multi-stratified work not only in her sculptural products and intervened books, but also in drawings where the wealth of media makes the image more complex.