Tamara Gonzales
Using yard-sale or dollar-store tablecloths, doilies, curtains, and lace collected during her international travels, Tamara Gonzales creates abstract paintings by spray painting through lace. Lace allows her to utilize pattern like different brushes while spray paint maintains an economy of surface. Especially important to Gonzales is that inherent in the different lace patterns are many of her prime interests: Baroque churches, rose windows, altars, excess, gaudiness, veiling, and craft. Along with an intensity of color and pattern Gonzales favors the ambiguous moments that occur when the patterning begins to blur. She often paints blind and it is not until she lifts the lace up from the canvas that she can see the drawing. The artist has also used an opened cardboard box as a stencil to create shapes that have morphed into totem figures. Even in these works that use a figure that lends to a narrative, her images stay fixed with the non-representational concerns of painting and a shallow frontal space.
Gonzales has had solo exhibitions in New York at Klaus von Nichtssagend, Shoot The Lobster, and Norte Maar. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at Coburn Projects in London, and in New York at MoMA PS1, …
Using yard-sale or dollar-store tablecloths, doilies, curtains, and lace collected during her international travels, Tamara Gonzales creates abstract paintings by spray painting through lace. Lace allows her to utilize pattern like different brushes while spray paint maintains an economy of surface. Especially important to Gonzales is that inherent in the different lace patterns are many of her prime interests: Baroque churches, rose windows, altars, excess, gaudiness, veiling, and craft. Along with an intensity of color and pattern Gonzales favors the ambiguous moments that occur when the patterning begins to blur. She often paints blind and it is not until she lifts the lace up from the canvas that she can see the drawing. The artist has also used an opened cardboard box as a stencil to create shapes that have morphed into totem figures. Even in these works that use a figure that lends to a narrative, her images stay fixed with the non-representational concerns of painting and a shallow frontal space.
Gonzales has had solo exhibitions in New York at Klaus von Nichtssagend, Shoot The Lobster, and Norte Maar. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at Coburn Projects in London, and in New York at MoMA PS1, Mixed Greens, Sargent’s Daughters, and Regina Rex, among other venues.
Courtesy of the artist
