July 20 - August 24, 2023
From Sicardi Ayers Bacino:
“Sicardi | Ayers | Bacino is pleased to present the group exhibition Touch me in our main gallery, featuring works by Jorge Eduardo Eielson (Lima, 1924-Milan, Italy, 2006), Arturo Herrera (Caracas, Venezuela, 1959), Sandra Monterroso (Guatemala City, Guatemala, 1974), Miguel Ángel Rojas (Bogotá, Colombia, 1946), Melanie Smith (Poole, England, 1965), Ana Maria Tavares (Minas Gerais, Brazil, 1958) and Marina Weffort (Sao Paulo, Brazil, 1978) curated by independent curator and writer Gabriela Rangel.
Join us for an opening reception on Thursday, July 20, from 6-8 pm.
Departing from different formations and cultural contexts, the artists selected for this show have developed a deep understanding of the relation between fabric and abstraction as a porous transnational language. They embrace these mediums as a source for examining issues of gender, waning creative traditions, and pressing matters on weak ecosystems. Touch me presents different perspectives of weaving or fabric making, including deconstructive approaches to the history of abstraction as in Arturo Herrera’s exquisite cut felt and the outstanding Amazzonia XXXV (1980) by Jorge Eielson, who began his poetic explorations on the quipu as early as in the 1960s. In tandem with the recovery of the Pre-conquest past, Sandra Monterroso’s organically dyed looms and fabrics convey the reverberations of a present that overlaps with ancient indigenous techniques.
Conceptual artists included in the show also critique social and economic inequalities. Miguel Ángel Rojas’ sculptural blankets allude to the violence and destitution resulting from the endemic violence in Colombia. Melanie Smith commissioned the Mexican feminist collective Lana Desastre to embroider handwoven compositions based on the Pi (π) number. Similarly, Ana Maria Tavares made soft sculptures in collaboration with craft women of the Brazilian Northeast with titles that refer to regions devastated by agents of destruction. Marina Weffort utilized the grid as a matrixial structure to bring together a feminist gesture of appropriation rather than a canonical undertaking of a cornerstone of modernism.
The show features groundbreaking work by artists who have often crossed paths between disciplines and genres, refusing the compartmentalizing and hierarchical logic of fine and applied arts of modern art. The works invite us to touch with the eyes what the hand created as an open-ended source of analogical creativity made with digital tools.
Exhibition Dates: July 20 – August 24, 2023
For inquiries and more information, contact Mónica Hernández at [email protected] and 832-921-7014 or call the gallery at 713-529-1313.”
Reception: July 20, 2023 | 6–8 pm
1506 West Alabama
Houston, 77098 TX
(713) 529-1313
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