Born in Valencia in 1949, Elena del Rivero has lived and worked in New York since 1991. In the early eighties she experimented with neo-Expressionism and later Minimalism. Since the early nineties, she has worked mainly on paper, studying various visual written forms to communicate personal experiences and focusing on the epistolary format. One of her best-known series of drawings is Letter to the Mother, initially inspired by Franz Kafka's Letter to his Father. Her works on paper, but also her paintings, installations and large-scale performances, are shrouded in a veil of poetic ambiguity that traces personal experiences, but also historical events she has witnessed, together with the everyday world and its multiple symbolic references. She frequently restores works that have been damaged during the creation process as a way of suturing 'wounds'. In addition to paper, she also employs household textiles such as tea towels, which she turns into anti-monuments to install in public spaces, transforming domesticity into the artist's laboratory of ideas.

Since the mid-1980s, she has exhibited in prominent venues in Spain and the United States, including the Museo de Navarra, Pamplona (1995), Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid (1998), Drawing Center, New York (2001), Institut Valencià d'Art Modern, Valencia (2006), International Center of Photography, New York (2011), Matadero. Centro de creación contemporánea, Madrid (2019), Tampa Museum of Art, Florida (2020), Museu d'Art Contemporani, Palma de Mallorca (2021), and City Hall, New York (2023). Her works are included in collections such as MoMa, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington, Fundació "la Caixa"; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; and MACBA, Barcelona, among others.