Lucía Antebi

Lucía Antebi (Buenos Aires, 1976) is a photographer whose work explores identity, memory, and the human behavior in public and private spaces. Born into a family shaped by exile — Jewish Syrian ancestors on her father’s side and Catholic Catalan exiles on her mother’s — Antebi’s personal history is marked by displacement and cultural intersection. Her parents renounced their respective religions in order to be together, and in 1979, following Argentina’s military coup, the family sought exile in Barcelona.

Growing up in post-dictatorship Spain, Antebi was educated in private schools within Catalonia’s bourgeois milieu. At seventeen, she discovered photography while studying in Illinois, an experience that awakened her lasting fascination with American documentary photography from the late 1970s and early 1980s. Upon returning to Barcelona, she completed her studies at the Institut d’Estudis Fotogràfics de Catalunya (IEFC).

Antebi’s early work, supported by grants from the City of Córdoba and the International Language School of Barcelona, engaged themes of identity, the nude, and the dynamics of public space. In her mid-twenties, she relocated to Madrid, where she expanded her practice into editorial photography, specializing in fashion and portraiture.

Her artistic work is rooted in the observation of everyday life, with a particular interest in human beings, their behavior within their environment, and the way this is shaped by culture and origins. Her preferred settings for photographing are urban parks and bourgeois social gatherings.