New York, NY – Efraín López is pleased to announce No Shoulder, an exhibition of new works by New York- based artist Gabriela Salazar. The exhibition will be on view from November 8 through December 21, 2024. The artist will present a suite of ten graphite drawings alongside a sculptural work. No Shoulder will be accompanied by an exhibition text authored by curator Ana Torok.
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Working across sculpture, installation, and drawing, Gabriela Salazar has developed a rich cross-media practice, which often addresses the tenuous balance between our natural and built environments. The daughter of Puerto Rican architects, Salazar continuously explores themes of building and rebuilding, whether in response to natural disasters or the passage of time, by isolating moments that speak ambiguously to both repair and disrepair. Her earlier work has featured receptive collaborations with nature as well as architecture. For a 2021 site-specific drawing, Holding Pattern, Walls (for Mara), produced at the Al Held Foundation, the artist rubbed powdered graphite directly onto the studio walls in a geometric composition which revealed the cracks and patches left behind by former studio residents along with the ad hoc arrangement of wood planks on its reverse. In her Leaves series (2023-ongoing), Salazar uses water-soluble paper to cast various household objects and matter–the resulting ghostly forms infused with traces of color leached from autumn leaves, kitchen scraps, coffee grounds, and other incidental media.
In this new body of work, Salazar has produced drawings in graphite and charcoal, all of which are based on photographs she shot earlier this year. The source material, culled from the collection of images on her iPhone and sometimes paired in diptychs, expose Salazar’s careful attention to her surroundings. Across the series, an attunement to interconnectedness rhymes rows of wrapped cables with the knotty roots of trees, or the spidery cracks in a sidewalk with the network of wrinkles across a multi-generational set of hands. An image of a collapsed billboard in San Juan, for instance, is directly juxtaposed with an intimate picture of the artist’s sleeping daughter. These opposing motifs—exterior/interior, neglect/care—are harmoniously connected through formal means as the linear thrust of the scaffold crosses the sheet’s edge and merges into the young subject’s collar. While explaining her process, Salazar has described it as a conversation with the source photograph, requiring problem-solving and experimentation to arrive at each drawn reproduction. In order to recreate the wood grain of a tree stump that had been abruptly chopped down near her home, she used the technique of debossing for its concentric rings. Observed closely, the recessed marks resemble script as if embedded with an inscrutable message.
Considering the snapshot quality of her subjects, whether a road that has suddenly flooded or a sinkhole that appeared overnight, Salazar’s time-intensive and laborious process might seem counterintuitive. Recalling previous projects, which centered on a daily drawing practice, here she has invested hours of close observation and illusionistic skill in order to translate each fleeting moment into a sensitively-rendered drawing. By distilling the visual effects of overwhelming and uncontrollable forces–weather, gravity, age–into the foundational elements of line, form, and value, Salazar’s grayscale reconstructions become a way of slowing time. Taken together, through its repeated motifs of knots and fissures, the work reenacts not only interconnection, but entanglement, encouraging us to look just as intently—if not for meaning, then for a direct confrontation with the precarity of everyday experience.
– Ana Torok
Gabriela Salazar was born in New York City to architects from Puerto Rico. She has had solo exhibitions at NURTUREart; The Bronx River Arts Center; The Lighthouse Works, Fishers Island; Efrain Lopez Gallery, Chicago; The River Valley Arts Collective at the Al Held Foundation, New York, and with the Climate Museum, in Washington Square Park, NYC. Her work has been included in group shows at Socrates Sculpture Park, the Queens Museum, El Museo del Barrio, The Drawing Center, Candice Madey Gallery, David Nolan Gallery, Someday Gallery, Storm King Art Center, and the Whitney Museum. Salazar’s work has also appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, hyperallergic, and The Brooklyn Rail. Residencies include Workspace (LMCC); Yaddo, MacDowell, Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, Abrons Arts Center, “Open Sessions” at The Drawing Center, and the Socrates Emerging Artist Fellowship. In 2023 she was named a NYFA/NYSCA Fellow in Craft/Sculpture from The New York Foundation of the Arts. She holds an MFA from Rhode Island School of Design, a BA from Yale University, and lives, works, and teaches in NYC.
About Efraín López
Efraín López is a Puerto Rican-American art dealer and exhibition maker based in New York City. Between 2012 and 2018, López founded and directed his eponymous gallery in Chicago, where he presented an ambitious and rigorous exhibition program, often giving artists their first solo presentation in the United States. His long-standing commitment to the career development of emerging artists has led to placements in major museum collections worldwide. In June of 2023 López opened Efraín López, a contemporary art gallery in New York’s Tribeca neighborhood. In September 2024, Susie Guzman joined Efraín López as partner. The program is conceptual, multidisciplinary, and globally minded, engaging both emerging and established artists.