Clare Rojas: Egret
@ Kavi Gupta Gallery
219 N Elizabeth St, Chicago, IL 60607
Opening Saturday, May 19th, from 4PM - 7PM
On view through Saturday, July 7th
Kavi Gupta is pleased to present Egret, an exhibition of new work by Clare Rojas at the gallery’s Elizabeth Street location.
Egret will feature more than 100 new abstract works, including one hundred 8×10-inch drawings. These drawings exemplify Rojas’s intensive drawing practice, in which she completes a finished work every day or two. Addressing this ritual in a personal note authored to viewers in the catalogue accompanying the show, Rojas says:
“When I wake up, I make my coffee, sit at my kitchen counter with my tiny light, reading glasses these days, and 20 different palettes of gauche colors collected and saved over the course of decades. These colors have traveled the world with me … There is an excitement and nervous energy … The feeling in my body, in the pit of my stomach, is similar to when I was a kid and I stood at the end of the high dive, looking down at the blue, chlorinated pool water, cautiously bouncing my courage out before I would close my eyes and jump. What is this fear? … Something this simple has no rules ….”
Egret will also feature nine new large-scale oil paintings, which continue to explore the tension of balance that is essential to Rojas’ visual vocabulary. Additionally, these oil paintings, which each took months to complete, express a different, extended, deeply contemplative relationship with time distinct from that which is expressed by her drawings
Also on view will be several sculptural works. Although the step from two to three-dimensionality may seem, as Rojas says, “like the most simple and straightforward transition,” these sculptures declare something inherently complex. Rojas plays with dimensionality in her drawings and paintings. Conversely, in her sculptures she strives to flatten space—to make 3-D look 2-D—essentially making objects into drawings.
Throughout Egret, Rojas continues her ongoing examination of the human will towards story, a compulsion marked by our instinctive search for narrative relationships with images, even when they are essentially abstract.
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Tags: Chicago, Clare Rojas, Egret, Kavi Gupta Gallery, near west side
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