‘It was a way of processing violences I’ve survived’: how iconoclastic musician Arca beat burnout with frenzied painting

After a meteoric decade in music, supporting the likes of Madonna and Beyoncé, the 36-year-old Venezuelan crashed out. Now the nightmarish paintings that got her back on track are on display Before Arca had released eight albums, including her Kick pentalogy; before she had collaborated with Björk and Rosalía and supported Beyoncé and Madonna in concert; the electronic musician, real name Alejandra Ghersi, was a young teen in her Caracas bedroom, uploading 3D animations to DeviantArt, the early-00s social media site for artists. “As many renderings as my family’s computer could handle,” the 36-year-old recalls. This interest in visual art comes full circle when the musician opens her first institutional exhibition at the ICA in London. Her medium now is painting, thickly layering canvases with oils, acrylic, spray paint, marker pen, glitter, latex and melted plastic. From this graffitied impasto, nightmarish faces emerge: Cheshire cat grins, gurning clowns and wide-eyed demons. They were never meant to be shown publicly, Ghersi embarking on them as a way of getting over the “burnout” she experienced from a meteoric decade in the music industry. “It was an attempt to