Virginia Jaramillo Point Omega Dallas Art Fair April 12-15, 2018
Virginia Jaramillo Point Omega At the 2018 edition of Dallas Art Fair, the Hales Project Room, New York will present Point Omega, a solo project running alongside and complementing Hales Gallery s main booth. Point Omega will put a spotlight on rarely seen historic works by American artist Virginia Jaramillo (b. 1939, El Paso, Texas). Jaramillo s work is currently touring US institutions in blockbuster exhibitions We Wanted A Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965 85 (Brooklyn Museum, Californian African American Museum, Albright Knox Gallery, ICA Boston) and Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power (Tate Modern, Crystal Bridges, Brooklyn Museum). Across her rich and varied work, Jaramillo has continually explored abstraction, rigorously experimenting with material and process to translate, in Jaramillo s words, the structure of our physical, spiritual and mental worlds through space and geometry in art. Much of this results from the experiences Jaramillo had throughout the 1970s, a decade in which she lived in New York, having relocated there from the Watts area of Los Angeles following the Civil Rights protests. In New York, Jaramillo s painting evolved in response to her new environment and community, in which she worked alongside figures such as Melvin Edwards, Kenneth Noland, and Frank Bowling. In Point Omega named after the spiritual belief and scientific speculation that everything in the universe is fated to spiral towards a final point of divine unification the Hales Project Room will focus on works created in New York between the early 1970s and the end of the decade. The show shares its name with the centerpiece of the booth, a large-scale painting that Jaramillo began in 1973 and completed early 2018. In this work, six panels painted with the same pigments in different proportions, and visually connected by lines rendered with stainless steel pigment, create a harmonized, unified whole. The show will also feature other paintings in which thin washes of oil paint are poured onto the canvas to create richly stained surfaces, as well as the Visual Theorems, a series of works from 1979 made from natural linen fibers and earth pigments. Crossing boundaries between traditionally separate categories painting and drawing, canvas and paper the artworks on display are united by an ongoing conceptual mission and formal echoes in their underlying geometry, as well as the tangible materiality of their layered compositions. Straight lines, intersecting arcs, and blocked-out forms, all projected with mathematical precision, organize fields of deep color. The resulting visual and concrete forms reflect and embody these processes by which we seek to organize our sensory experiences of space. The frameworks of reference explored in Jaramillo s work are inspired by a diverse range of experiences and influences, spanning history and crossing cultures. These include contemporary fields such as science fiction and modernist industrial design (during high school, Jaramillo and a selected group of other students made weekly visits to the celebrated designer Charles Eames s studio) as well as Celtic and Greek mythologies, pre-hispanic and non-western systems of spatial organization, and classical and sacred geometry. Each of these sources represents structural patterns conceived by individuals and societies in order to organize our sensed experiences of the physical, spiritual and mental worlds. From bold abstract canvases and sculptural mixed media compositions to meticulously formed pulp paintings, Jaramillo has forged a unique voice, experimenting with material and process to pursue her ongoing explorations of human perceptions of reality. For more information, please contact Hales Gallery Director, Stuart Morrison: stuartmorrison.com
ABOUT THE ARTIST Virginia Jaramillo (b. 1939, El Paso, Texas) studied at Otis Art Institute, Los Angeles, from 1958 61. Jaramillo lives and works in New York. Jaramillo first began showing in museums at age 18, when her work was exhibited in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art Annual, Los Angeles (1959 61). Since then, her work has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions at other prestigious institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1972); Mexican Museum, San Francisco (1980); A.I.R. Gallery, New York (1984); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2011); MoMA PS1, New York (2012); Brooklyn Museum, New York (2014, 2016); and Tate Modern, London (2016). Selected public and corporate collections include the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Richfield, Connecticut; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Mexican Museum, San Francisco; Pasadena Art Museum, California; Kemper Museum, Missouri; and the Museo Rufino Tamayo, Mexico City.
Virginia Jaramillo, Point Omega, 1973-2018, acrylic on canvas, 172.7 x 259.1 cm, 68 x 102 in, (V_JAR0196)
Virginia Jaramillo, Green Space, 1974, oil paint on canvas, 182.2 x 212.7 cm, 71 3/4 x 83 3/4 in, (V_JAR0058)
Virginia Jaramillo, Origin Legend, 1972, oil paint on canvas, 182.9 x 182.9 cm, 72 x 72 in, (V_JAR0041)
Virginia Jaramillo, Untitled, c.1973, oil on canvas, 121.9 x 121.9 cm, 48 x 48 in, (V_JAR0051)
Virginia Jaramillo, Visual Theorems 4, 1979, linen fibre with hand-ground earth pigments, 59.7 x 45.7 cm, 23 1/2 x 18 in, (V_JAR0070)
Virginia Jaramillo, Visual Theorems 13, 1979, linen fibre with hand-ground earth pigments, 62.9 x 47.6 cm, 24 3/4 x 18 3/4 in, (V_JAR0079)
Virginia Jaramillo, Visual Theorems 20, 1979, linen fibre with hand-ground earth pigments, 59.7 x 45.7 cm, 23 1/2 x 18 in, (V_JAR0086)