About the Artist

Alejandra Wohlstein, known as Ale, is a visual artist based in San José, Costa Rica. Her work moves between abstraction and figuration, drawing on the rhythms, textures and memory of the urban landscape. Through color, layered gesture and compositional tension, she explores presence, movement and the emotional essence of her subjects.

Rather than describing people as they appear, Ale seeks to reveal what feels essential. Her paintings reduce visual noise in order to bring forward the emotional core of a figure, allowing gesture, color and atmosphere to speak where literal representation becomes unnecessary. Each work becomes an invitation to look beyond appearance and toward presence.

Many of her figures inhabit imagined environments that blur the boundaries between memory, possibility and desire. By placing them in spaces that exist more in the emotional than the physical world, she reflects on the human capacity to inhabit, through imagination, the places we long for before we ever fully arrive.

Light—both literal and symbolic—runs throughout her practice. Whether emerging through saturated color, reflective surfaces or chromatic contrasts, luminosity becomes a way of suggesting vitality, resilience and the possibility of finding one’s own place to shine.

Across her collections, Ale builds images that feel both intuitive and deliberate. Layers of texture, line and color accumulate into compositions that balance immediacy with structure, softness with force, concealment with revelation. While each series pursues its own visual questions, all remain connected by a consistent search for emotional clarity through the language of painting.