Maria José Chica

Sin Título V

2025

As a gallerist, few moments are as rewarding as introducing collectors to an artist whose work speaks so profoundly to our shared human experience. Maria José Chica’s paintings do ex...

“Through painting, I am interested in reflecting on how time has been—and can be—represented through images and the connections between individuals. The concept of time has been expl...

A figure reclines in a red and yellow-strapped lawn chair. The figure sitting in the chair is activated by Aldrich’s transformation of paint and resin into oozing swaths of skin between the lawn chair straps. The chair, recalling the grid, works as a pattern trying to hold and contain the body resting inside it. -- Building on her previous show, Main Squeeze, which featured bodies pressing through the grid of lawn chairs, in “That Feeling When,” Aldrich expands the excess of materials to large figure paintings and small, overfilled sculptures. Aldrich uses thick materials that protrude from the surface, reminding the viewer that the paintings are not only physical objects in themselves, but also create the illusion of the picture. The work employs a risky excess of material that borders on uncontrollable; becoming metaphoric for barely controlled femininity, the attraction and repulsion of materialism, and the body pressing against constraints. The figures in the paintings are seen from behind or have turned away. The viewer is put in a place of questioning whether they are a voyeur or a co-viewer with the figure of something deeper in the picture plane. The full body paintings...

Kent Williams’ work melds the rigor of technical prowess with the iconoclast’s impulse to disrupt. Juxtaposing beautifully rendered classical forms with elements of abstraction and surrealism, Williams coaxes a sense of cohesion from essential contradictions. Although a virtuosic draftsman, he is concerned less with fidelity to the form than to the feeling. The result is an astonishing amalgamation of the sensual and the technical. Working in tactile surfaces and palpable brushstrokes, Williams doesn’t attempt to conceal the seams that form when joining contradictory concepts; carnal and cosmic, order and chaos, the sacred and the profane. Rather he allows us to witness the violence that occurs when two bodies collide and the beauty that can so often follow. Entanglement was commissioned as the cover art for the Criterion Collection DVD of "Women in Love".