Five Car Garage is delighted to present “Lente/Primavera”, (‘Spring’translated from Dutch and Spanish) an exhibition with two female artists, Lies Kraal and Anabel Juarez. Both LA transplants from Holland and Mexico respectively, whose work reaches across continents and decades, to connect almost audibly, with an unapologetic and synesthetic grab at your senses.

Lies Kraal, a 2018 Guggenheim Fellow, is well known for her monochrome paintings, which often feature smooth horizontal and/or vertical, convex or concave lines. These forms are created using various mediums and lots of sanding. They very subtly protrude and simultaneously disappear, depending on the angles of the sun, shadows and the time of day you encounter them. This perceptual and shifting focus with depth of field means that the paintings draw you in for a much deeper investigation, a prolonged and slow look. The paintings emanate an inner glow, one that has maybe earned your attention after about a hundred layers of paint. In the case of the green painting shown in this exhibition “15-1” 2015, which was primed with at least fifty undercoats of red acrylic paint allowing the following thin layers of green acrylic paint to vibrate on the surface. Kraal’s meticulous and reductive artworks, which are human in scale, revel in the felt experience and sensorial impressions, using color as just one vehicle of many finely honed skills she employs to make them feel vast - far bigger than they actually are.

The same visceral shift of scale and colors is true with Anabel Juarez’s small ceramic sculptures. Juarez, a recent MFA Graduate from UCLA, has created a body of work for Lente/Primavera that explore the territory between abstraction and representation.Polychromatic and energetic, these works playfully shift from landscape, to figure, to floral,and back around. Is it a female form arching backwards or a heavy laden tree-limb drooping? Working primarily with earthenware clay, color slips, and textured glazes, Juarez treats forms in the round as a site for exploring the overlaps and collisions between painting and sculpture. Her work blends elements and principles from both disciplines, while bringing you into a domain of her own joyful making. Juarez creates ceramics that call for a similar close observation and intimate regard as the paintings of Lies Kraal - please bring your head and neck -- you are going to be craning it.



Lies Kraal was born in Holland, but is a long time resident of Venice, CA. Kraal has shown her work internationally, with solo exhibitions in Los Angeles, Santa Fe, Mexico City, Seoul, and Germany. She has been included in important group exhibitions in New York, Los Angeles and Rome. In 2015 she was one of only six artists chosen to represent the Panza Collection in Rome at the first posthumous tribute to Dr. Panza. In 2003 she was a resident at the Chinati Foundation, Marfa, Texas; in 2005 a COLA Fellowship recipient, Los Angeles; in 2014 invited to the Parkfield Project, an artist retreat in California; in 2017 she was an artist in residence at Kaus Australis in Rotterdam. Her most recent solo exhibitions were in Los Angeles at Susanne Vielmetter LA Projects in 2016 and in Seoul 2017. Her work is included in the Panza Collection, Milan, Italy; the Jumex Colección, Mexico City; the Weisman Collection, Los Angeles, among others. In April 2018, Lies Kraal became a Guggenheim Fellow.

Anabel Juarez was born in Michoacan, Mexico, in 1988. She is currently based in Los Angeles, California. Juarez’s works are diverse in theme and medium. Often working on different bodies of work simultaneously; she creates both sculptural and two-dimensional works that range from intimate handheld to live size pieces. Juarez explores both abstraction and figuration through ceramics, drawings, and paintings. Anabel Juarez earned a BFA in ceramics from California State University, Long Beach in 2013, and an MFA in Art from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2017. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally in galleries such as Werby Gallery, the Earl and Virginia Green Art Gallery, Glass Box Gallery, Monte Vista Projects, UCLA New Wight Gallery, and Lefebvre et Fils Gallery. Additionally some of her work is held in the permanent collection of the French National Ceramics Museum-Sevres. She is the recipient of multiple awards; including The UCLA Graduate Division Award, Laura Anderson Scholarship, and the UCLA Graduate Opportunity Fellowship Program Scholarship along with many others.