Astrid Terrazas

Foundry Seoul is pleased to present Los Rostros Falsos, Astrid Terrazas’s first solo exhibition with Foundry Seoul. Working in an illustrative, highly detailed style and often adorning her canvases with talismans, charms, and threadwork, Terrazas’ multimedia paintings resemble a visual dream diary full of transient figures, archaic symbols, and chimerical narratives. Wielding a singular visual language which merges dreamscapes, Mexican ancestral folklore, lived experiences, and unearthly transfigurations, Terrazas’s recurring motifs function as artifacts of protection and evoke universal metaphors of transformation and healing.

In Los Rostros Falsos, or The False Faces, Terrazas presents a new series of paintings and that together create an allegory for the complexities of the menstrual cycle. With bold vulnerability, Terrazas expresses an internal fight to grapple with the unpredictability and instability of the mind and body. In multiple works a muscular horse becomes a stand-in for a metaphysical body that is uncontrollable and untamed. In Ovulación, 2023, Terrazas depicts the horse, its uterus in plain view, underneath a ghostly fire. The central figure is pinned underneath the animal’s hooves breaking skin, her blood flowing into a chalice reminiscent of a religious offering. The figure’s breast is shown as an anatomical drawing, which highlights a painful hormonal swell. Although pinned the figures reaches forwards for a rope to wrangle the beast.

Works such as I Am Not Made of Stone!/Solitude, 2024 are in conversation with In Ovulación, 2023. Here the central figure has mounted the horse, tenuously balanced. While nature still draws blood, the bloods flows into the horse and into a tree shaped heart. Written on the flighty doves who pick at her skin is a stanza from a poem the artist wrote which inspired the painting: “you fly like an angel, hands in prayer “I tried to help her.”” In Los Rostros Falsos, Terrazas portrays the perseverance to find guidance and agency while honoring the duality of nature and acceptance of what cannot be controlled.

Astrid Terrazas (b. 1996, Juarez, Mexico) received her BFA in Illustration from Pratt institute in 2018. She has exhibited at P·P·O·W, New York, NY; Lodos, Mexico City, MX; Y2K Group, New York, NY; Andrea Festa Fine Art, Rome, IT; Marinaro, New York, NY; Fort Makers, New York, NY; Gern en Regalia, New York, NY; Front Gallery, Houston, TX; 98 Orchard St, New York, NY; Nicodim, New York, NY; Lyles & King, New York, NY; Art in Common, Los Angeles, CA; Deli Gallery, Mexico City, MX; and UTA Artist Space, Los Angeles, CA; among others. Her work has been featured in articles in Art in America, Art Maze Mag, The Art Newspaper, and The Brooklyn Rail, among others. Terrazas was featured in 52 Artists: A Feminist Milestone at The Aldrich Contemporary Museum of Art, Ridgefield, CT in 2022 and Perhaps the Truth at Ballroom Marfa, Marfa, TX in 2023. Terrazas will present her first solo exhibitions with Foundry Seoul, South Korea in August 2024.