Nino Mier Gallery is thrilled to announce Teresa’s wings, a solo exhibition by Spanish artist Mònica Subidé. The exhibition is the artist’s third presentation with the gallery, and first in Los Angeles. Comprising new works on paper and paintings, Teresa’s wings will be open through August 12, 2023.
A series of new portraits and still lives line the gallery walls, each work seeking to reveal the recognition of individuality within the simplest contours of Subidé’s figures or scenes. With this body of work, the artist focuses on the emotive possibilities of painting, creating contemplative and placid scenes that reveal complex emotional truths.
From her muted color palettes to her unfinished lines and quasi-cubist approach to shading, Subidé paints in a style that recalls the work of Lucien Freud, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, and Pablo Picasso, whose portraits of his lover Marie-Thérèse provides inspiration for Subidé’s From Marie Thérèse (all works 2023). But her surfaces cultivate a uniquely distanced, quiet, warmth, one located in her figures’ magnetic and secretive faces, and in the limb-like floral arrangements that complement them.
Subidé’s flat pictorial spaces are balanced by the depth of her surfaces, each of which is textured through impasto, the retraction of paint, or collaged elements. Here, subject, environment, and surface are all compressed into one, inextricable entity—a compression characteristic of Subidé’s style at large.
Important figures from Subidé’s life appear throughout the works in the exhibition. In the exhibition’s titular work, Teresa’s wings, a figure painted in pink monochrome lies horizontally across the canvas as a kind of substitute for a horizon line. The subject’s features are rendered with minimal linework—a single brushstroke representing a necklace or collar, eyes reduced to simple ovals—emphasizing a serene quietude which blankets the exhibition as a whole. Two pale yellow wings sprout from either side of the figure’s chest, again represented through an outline flecked with stars, their interiors equal to the negative space of the canvas. Teresa is a dear, long-distance friend of the artist. After a months-long stay with Subidé, one filled with love, Teresa left Barcelona. “From that absence,” Subidé explains, “from that emptiness, came Teresa’s wings. I think that in some way I wanted to give her back what she gave me during these months by painting her.”
Subidé writes: “I had, from the first moment, the clear necessity to look for the recognition of the self in the simple contour of an eye, leaving aside the completeness of the composition and ornamental elements […] My margin of play within the compositions has been austere, forceful, and classic. More than ever, this is an exhibition to be seen live, since the soul of the paintings lies in that eye, that contour, that imperceptible look in a photograph.”
