Painting as Medium: The Alchemy of Image and Matter

Ambar Quijano presents Painting as Medium: The Alchemy of Image and Matter, a group show with works by Juana Subercaseaux, Meryl Yana, Isabella Russo Siqueira, Andrea Bores Chemor, Mariana Paniagua and Sandra Leal.

Featuring the painterly explorations of Juana Subercaseaux, Meryl Yana, Isabella Russo Siqueira, Andrea Bores Chemor, Mariana Paniagua, and Sandra Leal, Painting as Medium: The Alchemy of Image and Matter presents a collective meditation on painting as a site of transformation or locus of contemporary alchemy where abstract gestures, natural materials, sourced pigments, unexpected textures, and layered processes come together to reveal connections between the body, nature, and the act of painting itself. In the hands of these six female artists living and working in Mexico City, the once “universal” language of modernism – the often disembodied, rational, and male-dominated practice of abstraction – becomes situated, sensual and relational. Extending the legacy of their predecessors, they echo Agnes Martin’s meditative systems, Joan Mitchell’s emotional intensity, and even the bodily, intuitive, and process-driven approaches to painting of Lee Krasner and Helen Frankenthaler. Their work also resonates with Ana Mendieta’s spiritually infused and materially grounded practice, where artistic production becomes both medium and ritual. Thus shedding traditional associations with detachment and crafting an abstraction that listens, that decomposes and recomposes, and that holds space for the unknowable. Embracing the messiness of becoming, their work speaks to a quiet, radical power –where painting is not simply image-making, but a ritual of encounter between self and world, spirit and substance, feminine force and the elemental.

–Ambar Quijano