The Pit is pleased to present Ó Lua, a solo exhibition by New York based artist Tamara Gonzales.  An opening reception will be held on November 4, 2018 from 4-7pm, and the exhibition will be on view through December 16, 2018. 

In her first exhibition in Los Angeles, Gonzales will present a new series of large-scale paintings on canvas in the Pit II gallery.  The artist will also paint the gallery’s floor with one of her symbolic archetypal images of a snake’s tail. The paintings presented in Ó Lua, which means the moon in Portuguese, were made by the artist over the summer in upstate New York.  The humid rainy atmosphere in which she was working brought to mind the time she had spent in Pucallpa, the Amazonian rainforest.  The archetypal images take the central position in her compositions consisting of geometric totem like figures, and abstracted animals. For this exhibition, the artist found continued inspiration in the symbol of the bat. Gonzales’ canvases are painted with fast gestures of thinned paint, with sections covered in patterns from spray paint being applied through layers of lace. While creating the paintings for this exhibition, Gonzales found herself continually flipping her canvases in an attempt to create compositions that work upside down or right side up, inspired by a bat’s rotating orientation. The paintings in Ó Lua bring to mind Latin American symbology, histories, and equatorial jungle climates with their psychedelically charged modern totems.

Tamara Gonzales was born in Madera, CA in 1959 and lives in Brooklyn, NY. She received a Bachelor of Arts from Vermont College ADP in Montpelier, VT in 2005 and an Associate in Applied Science, Fine Arts from Parsons School of Design, New York, NY in 1990. Gonzales’s work has been featured in exhibitions such as Orpheus, PS1, Long Island City, NY (2007); 99¢, Jersey City Museum & Victory Hall, Jersey City, NJ (2007); Current/Undercurrent, Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY (1997); and Cool Girls, PS122, New York, NY (1996). Gonzales is a prominent participant in the community of artist-run spaces and artist-driven projects in New York City, and her work is held in public collections including the Bronx Museum of the Arts, Bronx, NY and the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA. She has been awarded residencies such as Center of Contemporary Art, Andratx, Mallorca, Spain (2012); International Artists Exchange Program, Basel, Switzerland (2008); Sanskriti Kendra, New Delhi, India (2001); Yaddo, Saratoga Springs, NY (1999); and Vermont Studio Center, Johnson, VT (1997).