Julia García is a Cuban-American artist based in Minneapolis, Minnesota; her solo exhibition “Slow Burn” is on view at Gaa Gallery, New York, through May 4, 2024. The gallery is located at 4 Cortlandt Alley, New York, New York (10013). Here are excerpts from her interview with Artnet Gallery Network:
Cuban-American artist Julia Garcia employs acrylic paint, ink, and dye in her paintings to create compositions that invite scrutiny, with the forms and figures seeming to blur and coalesce at the same time. Originally from Pompano Beach, Florida, and currently based in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Garcia is a graduate of the School of Visual Art and Hoffberger School of Painting at Maryland Institute College of Art with a BFA and MFA respectively. Her paintings are reminiscent of collage, with imagery that has been mined from a range of often disparate sources that she creatively unites.
On view through May 4, 2024, at Gaa Gallery, Garcia’s debut solo exhibition in New York “Slow Burn” features a body of new paintings and works on paper that probe ideas of nostalgia and desire—and the power each hold on both a personal and societal level.
Marking the occasion, we caught up with Garcia to learn more about how she creates her otherworldly images, and how the history of painting—and art on the whole—influences her practice.
Your solo exhibition “Slow Burn” at Gaa Gallery New York opened this week, can you tell us about the subject or themes behind the show?
It’s work that is pulling from the nostalgic feeling of images, which partially act through content, but also in the way they’re rendered. I use un-gessoed canvas, applying water before the acrylic and ink so the paint is subjected to the flow of liquid on the surface. Pigment is dispersing as time passes and the water evaporates—softening edges and mingling forms so that they bleed together. I’m referencing photographs, but because of the unfixed quality of the paint, their reliability as source documents is called into question. It’s a blurring that memory or nostalgia itself performs, where it delivers more fantasy than reality, and I’m interested in kind of playing with that. Fantasies serve someone, they have a relationship to a subject.
When creating these works, what types of materials or other sources of inspiration did you reference?
Well, I’m always collecting images. There’s a great physical archive in the main library here in Minneapolis that is just cutouts from ads, magazines, calendars. I’ve also been really into stock image sites, and documenting the images I see in banks, pharmaceutical ads, new apartment buildings—images meant to be placeholders for viewers to project their idealized selves onto. Part of my fascination with mannequins comes from this, they’re these almost uncanny spaces for projection, a figure but also a void. [. . .]
In your practice, you engage with the history of painting itself. What do you see the role of painting in society today?
I really think that is the nature of painting, and maybe all mediums in general, to be involved in a dialogue with its own history. This is completely just my taste, but I think there is something very special about the release of time in a painting, the unraveling. The potential to resist interpretation and remain outside of language, but also present new ways of seeing or looking. It’s interesting that this can be a consistent quality regardless of the context or time period when something was made. A cave painting is still impactful and relevant now, not just because of history but some quality of looking and being. [. . .]
Are there any works or projects you are working at presently, or hope to work on soon?
My attention right now is on an upcoming solo show with KDR gallery in Miami, which will open in June. I’m very excited about it, there’s a lot of personal significance to having a show in Miami—it’s where my abuelos immigrated to from Cuba in the 60s, and I spent a lot of time there when I was young. Getting to do this show feels like a homecoming moment to me, and also a testament to possibilities that they built for our family. I’ll also have a solo show in 2025 with Hair and Nails, my gallery in Minneapolis. They’re incredibly supportive of their artists, and I already know it’s going to be fun to make work for.
For full interview, see https://news.artnet.com/art-world/7-questions-julia-garcia-gaa-gallery-2460653
See more on Gaa Gallery at https://www.gaa-gallery.com/
[Shown above: Julia Garcia, “The Collector” (2024). Courtesy of the artist and Gaa Gallery, New York.]
Julia García is a Cuban-American artist based in Minneapolis, Minnesota; her solo exhibition “Slow Burn” is on view at Gaa Gallery, New York, through May 4, 2024. The gallery is located at 4 Cortlandt Alley, New York, New York (10013). Here are excerpts from her interview with Artnet Gallery Network: Cuban-American artist Julia Garcia employs acrylic paint,
