A woman with a veiled face holds a book while three roosters fight around her. The image is 30 metres high and covers the wall of a building in Berazategui, near Buenos Aires. Milu Correch does not reveal who this woman is. This deliberate restraint runs through her entire body of work.
The Street as School
Milagros “Milu” Correch was born in 1991 in Villa Urquiza, a neighbourhood in the north of Buenos Aires. In 2011 she watched her city fill up with murals and began painting walls herself. She did not go to an art academy. Instead, she learned in a workshop led by the Argentine muralists Emy Mariani and Lean Frizzera how to transfer motifs from her sketchbook onto buildings and to “think in m²”. She never adopted a pseudonym and has signed her work with her own name from the start.
“The streets of Buenos Aires have been my school,” says Correch. She paints with brush, roller and spray can, often across several storeys.
From Dulcinea to the Witches
Her first large mural was painted in 2013 in Quintanar de la Orden, Spain. It shows a Dulcinea of roughly 20 by 15 metres carrying Don Quixote and Sancho Panza on her shoulder. Invitations to festivals in Europe and South America followed.
Around 2017 she began a series in which masked children sit on old cars: a Fiat 126 in Sapri, a Peugeot in Fanzara, a scrap heap in Vienna. The series grew out of her first solo exhibition, Entre cenizas (Among Ashes), in Buenos Aires. That same year, the Dutch platform Street Art Today named her mural Óxido (Rust) in Quilmes among the best murals of the month.
At the end of 2017 she painted Ajo y Vino (Garlic and Wine) on a 28-storey façade in Belo Horizonte. Three Brazilian pixadores painted the background. The work marked the start of her witches series, about women who heal, who hold knowledge and who determine their own lives, and who were persecuted for it. In 2018 she referred to the witch trials of north-east Scotland at Nuart Aberdeen. The same year she painted Hecate, goddess of witches, in Campobasso.
Mystery Instead of Explanation
Correch works in the tradition of Latin American muralism, but unlike that tradition she does not set out to instruct. Her figures wear masks or have veiled faces. Ravens, roosters and dogs appear without their role ever being explained.
Women are at the centre of much of her work. Even so, she rejects the label “female street art”: for her, the street is no place for gender boundaries.
Between Wall and Studio
Alongside her murals, Correch produces studio works that turn to her immediate surroundings in Buenos Aires. She continues to paint internationally, including at MURAL Festival in Montréal and MurArcos in Portugal in 2024. At Pretty Portal her work was shown in the exhibition Unfenced, together with Irene Lasivita.
