PATRON presents She is sitting on her own shadow, our first solo exhibition with Mexico City-based artist Manuela García (b. 1982, Mexico City, Mexico). García employs subtle adaptations of natural materials to hone physical perception of human space. Through her sculptural and painting practice García shapes intimate encounters between material and the human body–manipulating and repurposing architectural and physical elements to challenge understandings of reality and solidity.

Raised in Medellin, García’s memories of an ever present threat of violence in an unstable socio-political terrain laid the conceptual ground for a visual language seeking to establish stability through material presence. García’s debut exhibition with PATRON centers a site-specific installation, an extension of Lineas, her large-scale sculptures, made from coils of metal wire, wrapped by hand in layer upon layer of felted black and white wool. Their soft, textile exterior belies their rigid, internal skeletal structure. Responding to the surrounding architecture, García unfurls and manipulates the form, catalyzing and releasing material tension against itself, allowing the line to cascade downward from a fixed point in the wall and organically weave through space. Her Lineas are both deliberation and liberation; at once drawings and sculptures that challenge the viewer to reconsider our own relationships to material, reality, and solidity. 

Emerging from García’s attempt at capturing the physical nature of memory are her painting series, El dolor en la mirada, encaustic paintings of dreamlike landscapes and amorphous figures. Through a reverse layering of wax and pigment, boundless, abstract forms emerge and dissipate within the 24”x 28” surfaces. Light filtering through the top layers of translucent wax illuminate and imbue the paintings with mystical presence the artist likens to “souls.” García’s mist-like compositions reveal themselves the way the memory of a dream might be recalled, and explore our own perception with and relation to physical spaces, offering no stable point of reference in which to orient oneself. 

By playing on the tensions between light and shadow, form and material, García examines our relationship to our physical surroundings and the ephemeral manifestations that offer evidence to presence.

Installation images