Sicardi | Ayers | Bacino

Sicardi | Ayers | Bacino is pleased to announce the solo exhibition The Healing Paradox, the gallery's second solo exhibition for Sandra Monterroso [b. 1974, Guatemala], in our main gallery. The Healing Paradox features new works in textile and paper that utilize traditional methods of dyeing and weaving in reference to Monterroso's indigenous Maya Q'eqchi ancestry, as is characteristic of her practice which explores the dynamics of indigenous culture in the postcolonial era, gender issues, and other constructs of power across media. A text written by independent curator Alma Ruiz accompanies the exhibition. As Ruiz writes, "Continuing her interest in Guatemalan textiles as art-making material and as tools to address her country's embattled history, Monterroso, an artist with Maya Q'eqchi' roots, focuses her attention this time on more modest materials. Leftover fabrics from a local rug factory and organic cotton and linen embellished with embroidery and neon lights effectively become a compelling locus where discussions about healing wounds within a complex postcolonial heritage occur. Monterroso utilizes soft materials paired with manufactured objects to construct visual paradoxes. For example, several pieces are made of fabrics originally destined for landfills. Woven by indigenous hands who labor for low salaries to produce beautifully crafted rugs for luxury homes, the scraps tangentially point to a socioeconomic hierarchy between the haves and have-nots. In rescuing the discarded materials, Monterroso performs a redeeming ritual, imbuing them with new life as artworks and, paradoxically, transforming them into repositories of the inequalities, discrimination, and racism that still exist toward marginalized groups without openly highlighting their victimization. In their conclusive form, the pieces are joined to create a whole, mending leads to metaphorical healing." Monterroso’s work is included in the permanent collections of Centro de Arte Fundación Ortiz-Gurdián, Managua, Nicaragua; Essex Collection of Art from Latin America (ESCALA), Colchester, England, UK; Fundación Paiz, Guatemala City, Guatemala; Museo de Arte y Diseño Contemporáneo (MADC), San José, Costa Rica; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (MNCARS), Madrid, Spain; YES Contemporary, Miami, Florida, USA; and many private collections.

Sicardi | Ayers | Bacino is pleased to announce the solo exhibition Lines here and there, the gallery's eighth exhibition featuring the work of Gego [Gertrud Goldschmidt] [1912, Germany - 1994, Venezuela], in our upstairs project room. Lines here and there features a selection of works on paper and three-dimensional wire drawings that represent Gego's decades-long exploration of the behaviors and qualities of the line that marks her distinct contribution to the development of post-war abstraction in Latin America. A text written by curator and art historian Mónica Amor accompanies the exhibition. As Amor writes, "It was the artist’s sustained exploration of line, not as the boundary of form but as mark, that led her to probe its multivalent identity: its capacity to flex, bend, twist, coil, direct, form, deform, alter, map, diagram, construct, and undo fixed relations between figure and ground, inside and outside. In this body of work, it is more accurate to speak of lines as both medium and mediation, since this otherwise discrete element common to the fields of architecture, art, design, and writing is deployed by Gego to weave the space in-between these forms of knowledge. Writ large, line in this oeuvre refuses to settle within the confines of a discipline, technique, or support. Instead, it is topological and relational. Topological because, as with figures that can be deformed without losing their properties, Gego’s line stretches, shrinks, knots, warps, and does many other things that even topology does not allow (it tears, interrupts, stops). However, like one of the most intriguing topological figures, the Möbius strip—which consists of a single strip, one end half-twisted and then attached to the other end so that the result is a one-sided surface with no inside and no outside—Gego’s line slides from paper to space and back again as if producing a continuous virtual plane. This accords with the treatment of the in-between lines not as ground but as active space and as increasingly engaging the edge of the support to suggest the line’s extension outside the limits of the plane." Gego’s works are represented in several major collections including Blanton Museum of Art, The University of Texas at Austin, Texas, USA; Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros (CPPC), Caracas, Venezuela and New York City, New York, USA; Daros Latinamerica Collection, Zurich, Switzerland; Fundación Banco Mercantil, Caracas, Venezuela; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Caracas (MACC), Venezuela; Museo de Arte Moderno Jesús Soto, Ciudad Bolívar, Venezuela; Museo de Bellas Artes, Caracas, Venezuela; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH), Texas, USA; Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York City, New York, USA; New York Public Library (NYPL), New York City, New York, USA; Pratt Graphic Art Center, New York City, New York, USA; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York City, New York, USA; and Taller de Artistas Gráficos Asociados (TAGA), Caracas, Venezuela.

Melanie Smith: Remain detached is Sicardi|Ayers|Bacino’s third solo exhibition for Melanie Smith [b. 1965, England/Works in Mexico City and London]. Remain detached features a new body of work that Smith began in 2020 during the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic. Stemming from the central piece, the video Fifteen Minutes of Sublime Meditation, the new works draw on the legacies of Surrealism and abstraction and span the media of video, watercolor, painting, collage, and textile, as is characteristic of Smith's diverse practice. A text written by art historian Mara Polgovsky accompanies the exhibition.

Xul Solar: The Wondrous Realities of Xul Solar is Sicardi | Ayers | Bacino’s first solo exhibition for Xul Solar [1887 – 1963, Argentina], a unique representative of the vanguard in Latin America whose art is expressionist, surrealist, symbolist, and modernist. The Wondrous Realities of Xul Solar features a selection of watercolors that aim to consider Xul’s common ground to the wondrous worlds championed by Surrealism. Gabriela Rangel has curated the exhibition and written the accompanying text.

Sicardi | Ayers | Bacino is pleased to announce the upcoming solo exhibition Oscar Muñoz: Intentos / Attempts, the gallery's fifth solo exhibition for Oscar Muñoz [b. 1951, Colombia/Lives in Colombia]. Intentos [Attempts] features a selection of works from his recent retrospective at the Blanton Museum of Art and video works from the artist's Intentos series. This series, that prizes process equally with product, aligns itself with Muñoz's decades-long experimentation with the field of photography, applying the image-capturing process to non-traditional mediums such as charcoal and water in methods that invite the element of chance to engage with themes of memory and mortality.

Sicardi | Ayers | Bacino is pleased to announce the upcoming solo exhibition Solid Void, our first solo exhibition for new gallery artist Reynier Leyva Novo [b. 1983, Cuba/Lives in the U.S.]. This exhibition features an installation of five hundred plaster casts of the empty interiors of vessels and a coordinating wall installation comprised of fifty embossed prints made from metal casts of the plaster sculptures. One of Cuba's leading conceptual artists, Novo combines anthropological research with cutting-edge technology to examine the psychological and sociological effects of complex issues throughout history, challenge ideology and symbols of power, and question notions of an individual’s ability to affect change.

Sicardi | Ayers | Bacino is pleased to present Gustavo Díaz: Confronting Silence, the gallery's third solo exhibition for contemporary artist Gustavo Díaz [b. 1969, Argentina / Lives in USA]. The exhibition features twelve new pencil drawings and four sound works (Brownian Flights), and is accompanied by a curatorial text written by Nikki Moore, PhD.

Sicardi | Ayers | Bacino is pleased to present the first international exhibition bringing together the work of Alfredo Volpi (1896-1988, Italy/Brazil) and Eleonore Koch (1926-2018, Germany/Brazil), in partnership with Cecilia Brunson Projects, London. A text written by curator Cecilia Brunson will accompany the exhibition.

Sicardi | Ayers | Bacino is pleased to announce the installation of Carlos Cruz-Diez's (1923-2019, Venezuela/France) immersive chromatic projection, Chromointerferent Environment, in our upstairs project room. The artist's iconic chromatic environments have featured notably across Houston, from the inclusion of Cromosaturación in his landmark retrospective at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston in 2011 and the site-specific installation Spatial Chromointerference at the Buffalo Bayou Cistern from 2018-2019 to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston's commission Cromosaturación MFAH for the underground tunnel leading to their new Nancy and Rich Kinder building open to the public now.

Sicardi | Ayers | Bacino is pleased to present a group exhibition featuring artists Gabriel de la Mora, León Ferrari, Cildo Meireles, Oscar Muñoz, Marie Orensanz, Miguel Angel Ríos, Miguel Ángel Rojas, John Sparagana, and Ana Maria Tavares, and we are excited to kick off our summer programming with a return to in-person opening receptions. An essay written by Independent Curator Ximena Gama accompanies the exhibition.

Sicardi | Ayers | Bacino is pleased to present "No visual distancing please...," a solo exhibition with new work by Marco Maggi (b. 1957, Uruguay). The exhibition will be Maggi’s sixth solo show at the gallery and features nine works created over the last year. While the grip of the global pandemic requires us to maintain physical distancing from one another and move much of our interpersonal communication and experiences online, his microscopic detailing and incredibly fine incisions into the paper invite us to come closer, demanding a physical and visual closeness to absorb the intricacies of the precisely-rendered world Maggi creates.

Sicardi | Ayers | Bacino is pleased present "And Yet It Moves!," the gallery's first solo exhibition for contemporary kinetic artist Elias Crespin (b. 1965, Venezuela/Paris). The exhibition features six of his electrokinetic mobiles, suspended geometric structures whose sophisticated spatial fluidity is activated by mathematical algorithms designed by the artist, reflecting his years as an engineer and his engagement with the legacies of such Venezuelan kinetic masters as Jesús Rafael Soto and Gego. The exhibition is accompanied by a curatorial text written by Domitille d'Orgeval.

Unearthing the Mirror, a solo exhibition with new work by Gabriel de la Mora (b. 1968, Mexico), is on view through February 27, 2021. The exhibition is De la Mora's fifth solo show at the gallery and features thirteen works made of pigmented feathers of turkeys native to Mexico. This series "Neornithes" exemplifies de la Mora's sophisticated treatment of highly delicate, intricate materials and the conceptual balance he strikes between universal geometric abstraction and the meaning generated by a specific place and time. The exhibition is accompanied by a curatorial text written by Gabriela Rangel, writer, curator, and Artistic Director for MALBA (Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires) in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Sicardi | Ayers | Bacino is pleased to present our new exhibition Nature, on view through December 19, 2020. This exhibition highlights artists Alberto Baraya, Claudio Bravo, Aldo Bonadei, Maria Fernanda Cardoso, Magdalena Fernández, Thomas Glassford, Gabriel de la Mora, Marie Orensanz, Alejandro Otero, Miguel Angel Ríos, Melanie Smith, and Ana Maria Tavares. All of these artists use close observation of nature as a starting point, whether conceptually or in terms of materials used, to create this diverse body of work dating from 1950 to today. During the unprecedented global shutdown caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and a radical shift in lifestyle, many people have found the opportunity to reconnect with nature by spending more time outdoors and adopting a slower-paced lifestyle more attuned to natural rhythms. The artists presented here explore themes from environmental conservation to cycles of life and death and celebrate the inherent order and beauty within nature both on a microscopic and a macroscopic scale. A return to nature might be the only answer to the mounting environmental and global health crises we as a population face today. Within nature, many answers can be found as to how to live responsibly and sustainably, and many cures may be found to the illnesses that plague our population. The gallery is open by appointment only. We are closely following local government guidelines and taking every precaution to ensure the well-being of our visitors and team. To schedule a visit, call or text Will Isbell at 832.264.3466, email info@sicardi.com, or call 713.529.1313.

As Tobias Ostrander explains, "With the title of his current exhibition, Incompleteness: The Poetics of the Intangible, Díaz alludes to the “incompleteness theorem” by Kurt Gödel, originally published in 1931, in which the mathematician articulates the idea that for any law or logic to be “complete” it must contain within it its own contradiction. His thinking, based in science but more philosophical or even existential in character, implies that we are all in fact incomplete and only within our own contradictions might we approach a sense of wholeness. Díaz combines this reference with those of the “intangible,” which addresses his consistent experimentation with the limits of materiality, often pushing the structure of paper close to the point of disintegration."