February 8 - April 13, 2025
From Pablo Cardoza Gallery:
“Pablo Cardoza Gallery is pleased to present a group show featuring Manik Raj Nakra and Gabo Martinez. Opening reception is Saturday February 8th, 2025 from 1pm-6pm.
Manik Raj Nakra excavates our relationship between the earth and the divine, and the political histories that influence our existence. Using artifacts of early civilizations, Indian iconography, colonial anachronisms and mythologies of ancient cultures, he explores ceremony, ritual, memory and revelation. The compositions in this suite of artworks reference a common scene in “slasher” films – a quick framed shot of the killers raised arm with a weapon, except with apex predators as the slashers, reaching for the sky, giving an existential quality to his post impressionistic landscapes on stained ceramic stucco. The interruption of landscapes stand in for colonialism, using animals as symbols of both European monarchies, but also as indigenous deities. These animals reach out to heaven, walking the line of Manifest Destiny, and of revelations about our spiritual relationship to nature.
Nakra currently lives and works in Austin, Texas. He received his BA from the University of Texas and he has lived in Houston, Seattle and Noida, India. His work has been included in numerous solo and group exhibitions throughout Texas and San Francisco. He participated in The LINE Residency in 2020, and was included in his first institutional museum show at The Contemporary, Austin Texas in 2021. He has worked with clients such as The LINE Hotel, Converse, Facebook, Urban Outfitters and more. He was born in Olympia, Washington in 1982.
Gabo Martinez was born in Tarimoro, Guanajuato and since moving to Texas has spent every summer visiting the scenic valleys and streets paved with ancient terracotta bricks. Inspired by her indigenous Mexican culture and her research into Native American visual traditions, Gabo works with terracotta clay, sgraffito technique and vibrantly colored slips. Her pieces evoke ongoing reconciliation of civilizations, languages and generations. The repetition of carved shapes, not only recall the complex history of labor and production in Mexican craftwork, but also a sense of progress, meditation and healing only possible over time. Acknowledging these themes is an offering of love to her viewer and to herself. It is her goal to create a body of work that communicates how we manifest the stories, skills and sanctity of the generations that came before us.
Martinez was born in Tarimoro, Guanajuato, MX and currently lives in Houston, TX. She earned her BFA in Studio Art with a concentration in Ceramics from Texas State University in 2018. Her work has been exhibited at Conduit Gallery, Front Gallery, Texas State Galleries, Rockport Center for the Arts, and the Historic Pearl Brewery, all throughout Texas. She is a founder of the Tepeyac Collective, a collective that aims to organize and highlight BIPOC Clay artists in Central TX as a response to the lack of diversity and gate-keeping within the current clay community.”
Reception: February 8, 2025 | 1–6 pm
803 William #2
Houston, 77002 Texas
832-998-7110
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