Tamara Gonzales

Tamara Gonzales continues to experiment with the power of the drawn line and painted mark. Following her 2024 exhibition, Amplifiers, which focused on images of frames, mirrors, and portals, Brujas examines the recurrent linear grids that are formed from looping lines and scribbles. Evoking ideas of language, letter-writing, or spell-casting, these new works are rigorous in their formalist compositional structure, while exuding a lightness of touch and meandering pleasure in their making.

This series of paintings grew in part from Gonzales’s walks through the fields surrounding her home in Upstate New York. Although she returned to the same paths again and again, the landscape was never quite the same due to the natural growth and constant movement of plants and animals living there. Gonzales translates this experience into pattern. Through hand-drawn marks, each painting develops a structure that is both continuous and ever-changing.

Gonzales’s visual vocabulary forms a language without fixed meaning—one which can represent experiences and carry energy. She relates this idea to Indra’s Net, the Vedic image of an infinite jeweled net in which every jewel reflects every other jewel. Similarly, the paintings create a field of interconnected relationships, in which each mark is both distinct and part of a larger whole. What initially appears to be simple repetition becomes a network of echoes, reflections, and transmissions.

Tamara Gonzales (b. 1959, USA) is a painter and sculptor based in Brooklyn and Bovina, New York. Recently her work has been included in exhibitions at Palm Springs Art Museum, Palm Springs, CA; Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, CA; The Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, New York; Anton Kern, New York, NY; Brigitte Mulholland, Paris, FR; Eric Firestone, New York, NY; The Beeler Gallery at Columbus College of Art and Design, Ohio; Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles; The Pit, Los Angeles; and the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia. Her work is in the permanent collections of 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. Her practice has been written about in the New Yorker, The Brooklyn Rail, Hyperallergic, and ArtNews. This is Gonzales’s sixth solo exhibition with Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery.