Anya Tish Gallery is excited to present Dialogues: A Convergence of Color and Form, an exhibition featuring two Houston-based Latinx artists: Colombian-born Tatiana Escallón and Mexico-born Marisol Valencia, who will share the gallery space with their thought-provoking, meticulous, and highly textural artworks. Tatiana Escallón’s large format abstract paintings confront the viewer with raw vivid markings and brilliant self-authored texts. Complimenting the space with a subtle grace are Marisol Valencia’s minimal, yet highly complex monochromatic porcelain sculptures. Although employing different techniques and mediums, both artists embrace the emotive value of color and form, highlighting themes such as memory, displacement, and feminism. 

With a background in graphics combined with an affinity for poetry, Tatiana Escallón creates large scale abstract paintings that are riddled with accentuated gestural marks, energetic etchings, and a hidden language of her own. Utilizing a strict, yet pleasing, color palette, Escallón incorporates written poetry, improvising and teetering between her native language of Spanish and the adopted English. Many of Escallón’s poems are inspired by her continuous intellectual journey as a woman and mother. In her most recent, highly visceral works the artist experiments with a variety of materials such as acrylics, oils, graphite, rope, and wood; moving away from symmetry, the artist lets the lines and splashes of contrasting colors arrange themselves in space, thus pushing the physical boundaries of the canvas. Placing her in the broad realm of Abstract Expressionism, her striking works suggest contemporary artists such as Helen Frankenthaler, Willem de Kooning, Cy Twombly, and Franz Kline. 

Marisol Valencia’s new mixed-media sculptures, Ways to Endure, is a series of works that seek to understand the stress and the breaking point of materials. Pushing porcelain to the outer limits of its physical capabilities, her new work investigates the boundaries and connections between strength and vulnerability. Utilizing an ordinary cardboard box as the armature for her fascinating sculptures, Valencia covers a series of identical boxes with a porcelain slip then fires each one at an unusually high temperature. This controlled effect causes cracks, deformations, and sometimes even total collapse of the pieces, as each identical box endures the firing process differently. This anamorphosis of matter and purposeful chaos in Valencia’s work acts as a metaphor for what individuals may experience when going through a tragic time in their lives. Some may bend to the will of a tragedy while others remain resilient, some may need to be re-fired and put back together again like the pieces of Valencia’s delicate sculptures. The arduous and demanding process results in distinctly powerful sculptures, imbued with beauty, texture, and depth.