Everyone Has Those Spaces

Kavi Gupta Gallery is pleased to present its fourth solo exhibition of work by Clare E. Rojas. This new body of work, inspired by an observance of forms in nature, continues Rojas’s study of geometric abstraction that was introduced in her exhibition Spaces In Between, at Kavi Gupta in 2012.
 
Historically, Rojas is well known for her narrative and folk-influenced approach to gender and domesticity through painting, installation, and performance. Her more recent abstract works are formalist reductions evocative of Kazimir Malevich or Ellsworth Kelly with a strong emphasis on the floating image in space. Removing the subjects from these paintings and nurturing her instinctual disposition toward certain shapes and colors, Rojas is constructing an exercise of simplicity and self-reflection. In some works, the forms are in elegant balance with bold, white negative space of which Rojas has said, “I see it, and almost hear it, like you would hear the resonance of a sound in space.”
 
Although visually distant from her folk art tableaus, the connections to the flattened geometric works are clear. The abstract pieces are devoid of the figures and decorative patterns from her older works but retain the hand-made craft appearance with visible, free-hand brushstrokes reminiscent of the structured and elegant tradition of hand painted signs.
 
Clare Rojas (b. 1976) lives and works in San Francisco. Recent solo and group exhibitions include Carved, Cast, Crumpled: Sculpture All Ways at the Smart Museum of Art in Chicago, Caerulea at Paule Anglim in San Francisco, Clare Rojas at Vladmir Restoin Roitfeld in New York, Clare Rojas at Galleri Nicolai Wallner in Copenhagen, and Pith at Prism in Los Angeles. Solo museum shows include the Museum of Craft and Folk Art, San Francisco; Riverside Art Museum, CA; The Rose Art Museum, Boston; Museo De Arte Comtemporaneo De Castilla y Leon; Museum Het Domein, Sittard; Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita; Knoxville Museum of Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.