By Rosalba Márquez
This April, a month when thousands of visitors come to our city to enjoy our traditions, history, culture and art, it is with great pleasure that Casa Europa México will be presenting the work of two great artists, Gaby Ávila and Mac Thigpen, through a joint exhibition entitled Landscapes.
Life with all its diversity of images that, through the eyes of both artists, overflows with colors, vibrations, and emotions ranging from excitement to feelings of profound tranquillity in the beholder.
Ávila, strongly influenced by her uncle since she was a child, rapidly discovered how much she was attracted to observing art, and how it awakened such great joy in her. This led her to go on to study drawing, painting, and photography at the Potosino Institute of Fine Arts, where she became part of the painting production workshop directed by the teacher Lina Lanz, in the city of San Luis Potosí. Ávila has already held several exhibitions throughout Mexico and has also shown her work at major international exhibitions.
She uses her faithful companion, photography, to capture fragments of real life and this enables her to observe even the tiniest of details. This, in turn, allows her to give free rein to her own emotions, which she then expresses through painting, adding the unique touch of what her own soul and spirit have to transmit. Her vibrant palette intensely engages her audience in the various paintings in her collection, A Walk in the City: Urban Views.
For his part, from his early childhood, Thigpen has been constantly seeking ways of expressing his creative side. In the course of a lifetime, he has discovered that to be creative is, in fact, to become a giver of life, to fill others with hope, enabling them to envision previously unthought of possibilities. These characteristics all abound in his pieces. In a constant play between light, color, and shadows, his canvases are nothing less than pure poetry.
Thigpen’s life as a creator first began in our city, to which he felt strongly attracted, by both its culture and its unique people. The colorful streets and particular nature of the region have contributed much to the shaping of his work over the years.
In this exhibition,, convinced that art is a means to give meaning to, and to express, both the stability and the changes of life, its beauty and its struggles alike, Thigpen shares with us his series, Stability, Change, Meaning. Through his works, he demonstrates how we, as human beings, all strive to make sense of the world around us, both to what always remains as a constant, as well as to the sudden changes which can occur in life and death. Apart from landscapes and diverse forms, his portraits address how, in 2020, the whole world was affected by COVID-19, which changed the way we interact with others on both a global and a more intimate level—how human beings from one moment to the next began to hide our expressions behind our masks.
The opening ceremony is on April 12 at 6pm and the work will be shown until May 8. Admission is free, 10am to 5pm.
Exhibition
“Landscapes”
Apr 13–May 8
Casa Europa México
San Francisco 23
415 121 7277
Free
