Juxtapoz Journal – Mònica Subidé and “Teresa’s wings”

Nino Mier Gallery is thrilled to announce Teresa’s wings, a solo exhibition by Spanish artist Mònica Subidé. The exhibition is the artist’s third presentation with the gallery, and first in Los Angeles. Comprising new works on paper and work, Teresa’s wings will probably be open by way of August 12, 2023.

A collection of recent portraits and nonetheless lives line the gallery partitions, every work looking for to disclose the popularity of individuality throughout the easiest contours of Subidé’s figures or scenes. With this physique of labor, the artist focuses on the emotive prospects of portray, creating contemplative and placid scenes that reveal advanced emotional truths.

From her muted colour palettes to her unfinished strains and quasi-cubist strategy to shading, Subidé paints in a method that recollects the work of Lucien Freud, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, and Pablo Picasso, whose portraits of his lover Marie-Thérèse gives inspiration for Subidé’s From Marie Thérèse (all works 2023). However her surfaces domesticate a uniquely distanced, quiet, heat, one positioned in her figures’ magnetic and secretive faces, and within the limb-like floral preparations that complement them.

Subidé’s flat pictorial areas are balanced by the depth of her surfaces, every of which is textured by way of impasto, the retraction of paint, or collaged components. Right here, topic, surroundings, and floor are all compressed into one, inextricable entity—a compression attribute of Subidé’s fashion at massive.

Vital figures from Subidé’s life seem all through the works within the exhibition. Within the exhibition’s titular work, Teresa’s wings, a determine painted in pink monochrome lies horizontally throughout the canvas as a form of substitute for a horizon line. The topic’s options are rendered with minimal linework—a single brushstroke representing a necklace or collar, eyes diminished to easy ovals—emphasizing a serene quietude which blankets the exhibition as a complete. Two pale yellow wings sprout from both aspect of the determine’s chest, once more represented by way of an overview flecked with stars, their interiors equal to the unfavourable area of the canvas. Teresa is a pricey, long-distance good friend of the artist. After a months-long stick with Subidé, one full of love, Teresa left Barcelona. “From that absence,” Subidé explains, “from that vacancy, got here Teresa’s wings. I believe that in a roundabout way I needed to present her again what she gave me throughout these months by portray her.”

Subidé writes: “I had, from the primary second, the clear necessity to search for the popularity of the self within the easy contour of a watch, leaving apart the completeness of the composition and decorative components […] My margin of play throughout the compositions has been austere, forceful, and traditional. Greater than ever, that is an exhibition to be seen stay, because the soul of the work lies in that eye, that contour, that imperceptible look in {a photograph}.”