OPENING RECEPTION: 1st THURSDAY, MARCH 7th | FROM 5-8pm
Sullivan Goss is excited to announce its second solo exhibition for MARIA RENDÓN called Holy Water. The exhibition takes its name partly from a 1977 essay by Joan Didion and partly from her abiding interest in both the local landscape and the essential conditions of our existence. Following on the heels of her nearly sold out 2021 exhibitionRain at Sullivan Goss and a 2022 solo exhibition in Seoul, South Korea, Holy Water will feature a suite of seventeen enigmatic new paintings that the artist has worked on over the past few years.
Maria prefers painting on wood panels and on paper that have a bit of a raw edge. She works slowly in part because she doesn’t want to overwork her paintings or make them feel overdetermined. Some of her small paintings take over a year to produce. She’s restrained, patient, and intuitive. Her work is noted for its sophisticated color sense and for the myriad textures that she achieves from her particular mixtures of acrylic, flashe, and water. She thins out her paints with water, which creates a number of surface effects that recall watercolor painting while at the same time exhibiting a density of color more often associated with oil painting.
The compositions may reference a particular landscape that Maria has encountered in the hills above Santa Barbara or in her travels abroad, but she may also be responding to a particular shape, a color relationship, or something she’s been reading. Maria looks at a lot of other painters, too. Not quite recognizable and not quite abstract, we get a kind of stream of consciousness image: part dream, part observation. Her work relates her subjective experience. It seeks the poetic over the descriptive. Her paintings are concerned with deep emotions and fleeting apprehensions of other-worldy realms. Some of them even evoke the sense of a parallel or “deeper” reality, speaking, perhaps, to the “holy” part of the “holy water” exhibition title.
ABOUT THE ARTIST:
MARIA RENDÓN works and lives in Santa Barbara and maintains an active presence in the L.A. art community. She completed a BFA at the Universidad Anáhuac Mexico City and a second at the Art Center College of Design, where she then taught for over ten years. During that time, she worked as an illustrator for an impressive list of international clients. Her work is featured in New American Paintings #123, Graphis #355 and Taschen’s book, Illustration Now! While she was earning her MFA at U.C.S.B. in 2013, Sullivan Goss held its first significant exhibition for Maria called JUST BETWEEN US. In 2021, the gallery held another solo exhibition for Maria called Rain that nearly sold out. This is the artist’s second solo exhibition with Sullivan Goss.
Light Landing, a painting by Maria Rendón, whose work is on view through April 22 at Sullivan Goss, in Santa Barbara, California.
© The artist. Courtesy Sullivan Goss, Santa Barbara, California
Opening March 1 at Sullivan Goss: a “second solo exhibition for Maria Rendón called Holy Water. The exhibition takes its name partly from a 1977 essay by Joan Didion and partly from her abiding interest in both the local landscape and the essential conditions of our existence.” Above: “Rotación” (detail).
Sullivan Goss will present a solo exhibit for Santa Barbara artist María G. Rendón called Holy Water, March 1-Aprill 22 at the gallery, 11 E. Anapamu St., Santa Barbara. Rendón will be present at the 1st Thursday reception on March 7.
