COMMON SKIN FANTASY
with Alejandra Moros

2026

KDR, Miami, FL

KDR is pleased to present Common Skin Fantasy, a two-person exhibition by Miami-based artists Alicia Bilbao and Alejandra Moros.

Common Skin Fantasy marks the first time the two artists’ works have existed in dialogue, creating an environment where materials, conceptual references, and audience projections expand in uncanny ways that reflect the scope of both practices.

Born in Heidelberg, Germany, and moving to Miami in her teenage years, Bilbao’s sculpture-based practice exists somewhere between the histories of fictional myths and the otherwise brutal psychological revelations that reality inevitably trails. Born in Miami, Moros’s multidisciplinary practice, taking shape primarily through painting within this exhibition, explores transformation, adaptation across psychological, ecological, and collective systems, and the mirrored possibilities of fiction.

Introducing their works through the unusually apt reflections on the psychoanalytic concept by Didier Anzieu, Common Skin Fantasy theorizes the imaginary state of an infant whose skin-to-skin contact through daily care leads them to feel no physical or psychological boundary between themselves and their mother, a fantasy that will eventually be disrupted by inevitable growth and an awareness of their own skin. This symbiotic dissolving of boundaries between maker and child resonates with Moros’s and Bilbao’s practices, and oddly enough, even more so when their work is placed in curatorial kinship.

Where Moros may spend years collecting visual references for her paintings, ranging from Victorian-era prosthetics and the shedding of reptilian skins to the pollination processes of orchids, Bilbao, who works as a scientific laboratory researcher by day, intimately creates sculptural figures from artificial and organic materials, ranging from epoxy clay and resin to tufts of her own hair and animal pelts. The fragmented bodies and small faces she renders tend to evoke the illusion of real psychological discrepancies possible within her figures. While Bilbao reinforces the strange familiarity of the figure through rendering an isolated stance, a blank human glare, the essence of a simple gesture held in suspension, Moros dissociates us from our own cognitive reserves, creating spectral remnants of something that perhaps once belonged to the organic world.

Within the framework of the exhibition title, the question almost begs itself: which of the two is the mother, and which is the child? More conclusively, however, it feels as though the answer lies somewhere within the tension of each artist’s relationship to the molding of their own fictional and fantastical environments. The work, made by two devoted and nimble hands spending hours painting the softness of light reflecting off fleshy gums or sanding the delicate and tenuous details of a clay doll’s fingertips, seems to symbolize the infant itself: inevitably adapting, progressively taking up more room, and vulnerably rendering its own skin, open to interpretation and consciousness. Meanwhile, its makers, Moros and Bilbao, have already soaked up some of the realities of the world, consequently creating tender dystopias that, too, allow them to temporarily lose the boundaries of where their skin begins and ends.

Words by Catherine Mary Camargo.