Klaus von Nichtssagend is pleased to announce an upcoming exhibition of paintings by Tamara Gonzales, opening January 12 and on view through February 17, 2024. Titled Amplifiers, the show will feature new works focusing on ornate frame motifs that encompass the outer bounds of each canvas as well as paintings featuring Gonzales’s distinctive cast of figures and animalian forms.
In medicinal discourse, an amplifier is something that enhances the effect of a substance to push one’s experience to a desired effect. The image of the frame is foregrounded in these new works, alluding to a time when an elaborate frame served as the finishing touch on a work of art, meant to enhance its beauty in the eye of the beholder. Gonzales’s frame images are patterned with frolicsome lines and marks, which are developed through her direct drawing process. The interior of the canvases lack a rendered subject and are instead filled with swashes of color or brushstrokes. Gonzales sees this deep and expansive space as psychically reflective: a mirror of sorts, amplified by its boundaries.
In addition to these works, the exhibition will feature colorful paintings where the canvas is filled with the dancing, posing characters from Gonzales’s lexicon. These figures create a dynamic interplay between the artist’s visions, dreams, and spiritual experiences – lively, colorful, and playful, yet provocative.
Tamara Gonzales was born in Madera, California and currently lives and works in Brooklyn and Bovina, New York. Her work has been written about in the New Yorker, The Brooklyn Rail, Hyperallergic, and ArtNews. Recently her work has been included in exhibitions at Eric Firestone Gallery, Analog Diary, Norte Maar, Anton Kern WINDOW, The Beeler Gallery at Columbus College of Art and Design,, Ohio, Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles, The River Arts Collective, Catskill, NY, The Pit in Palm Springs, and the High Museum of Art, Atlanta. Public collections containing her work include the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA; the Bronx Museum of Art, New York; San Antonio Museum of Art; the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick, Maine; and the Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, Maine.
