Manuela Gonzalez: Rosa Mística
September 4 - 9, 2024 | SPRING/BREAK Art Show, 75 Varick Street, New York, NY
mtn space gallery is pleased to present a selection of textile paintings by Colombian/Floridian artist Manuela Gonzalez, co-curated by Tina Caso and Melissa Delprete.
Like an amalgamation of Jasper Johns’ objects with Agnes Martin’s grids — “things the mind already knows” meets “what’s known forever in the mind” — this body of work fuses the familiar but oft-unexamined visual language of interiors with key tenants of geometric abstraction. The result is a representation of abstracted domestic landscapes, one that is immediate and paradoxical in nature.
Gonzalez grew up in a household where women were responsible for the meticulous curation of this domestic landscape. Today, she uses wallpaper, curtains, bedding, and other fabrics as the basis for her oeuvre, honoring these materials beyond their assigned function as backdrops to everyday life. This literal materiality honors the spirit of collective care that is innate to Gonzalez’s domestic upbringing, one that is also innate to the history of textiles in general (see: Women’s Work, The First 20,000 Years: Women, Cloth, and Society in Early Times by Elizabeth Wayland Barker, 1994).
The works becomes paradoxically-activated with Gonzalez’s meticulously-painted geometries/grids, which intersect with varying degrees of material three-dimensionality interwoven with canvas — an early critical moment where the interior collides with a world where it was never welcome, that of the white, mostly male art world falsely credited with the invention of abstraction, one that repeatedly deemed textiles unworthy without honoring paintings’ roots in the field. In this way, the textile paintings truly “work against their cartographic instinct...elevating what could be a chart or graph into the realm of Art” on both the interior and exterior level.
The works are further activated in a gallery setting with or without an audience. While Gonzalez’s materials are immediately recognizable as domestic across viewership, the textile paintings open up an art historical chasm in this setting, creating a deeply masked tension. While Gonzalez doesn’t seek to exalt one over another, her work is an invitation to “examine the present and historical conditions necessary for the existence of these objects and traditions,” and allows for a dialogue that traverses what were once completely divided realms.
Manuela Gonzalez is a Lake Worth Beach-based artist from Medellín, Colombia. She holds a BFA from Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA from Yale University. Through the exploration of multiple materials, techniques and mediums, Gonzalez’s studio practice has developed from closely examining the visual language of textiles as they relate to the history of abstraction within the western canon. She investigates fabric and textile based craft techniques as vessels for personal and collective histories. Her work has been exhibited in Estamos Bien - La Trienal 20/21 at El Museo del Barrio and Cooper Union Gallery, New York, NY, and has been featured in The Brooklyn Rail (January 2021) and New American Painting (May 2020), among many others. She recently completed residencies with New Wave, West Palm Beach, FL and Vermont Studio Center, Johnson, VT. Rosa Mística is her second solo exhibition with mtn space gallery.