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Anabel Juarez

Xochitla

Los Angeles | March 14 - April 30 2020
Press:   ARTFORUM







Five Car Garage and Lefebvre et Fils Gallery, Paris are delighted to present “Xochitla”  a  solo exhibition with Anabel Juarez ,  which is Nahuatl for “garden” or “place of flowers”. Juarez presents new large-scale ceramic sculptures that the artist developed from her interest in floral representation in Mexican culture. Civilizations  like the Aztecs cultivated and harvested several types of flowers for ornamental, religious, ritual, medicinal purposes, and often represented these flowers in stone and ceramics.

In her last two person show “Lente/Primavera” at Five Car Garage, Juarez created abstract and intimately scaled ceramic sculptures,  which alluded to the landscape through simplified forms and vivid colors. The Mexican landscape and native plants  have long been a subject for several Mexican artists who engage with identity through nature, in their work. For “Xochitla” Anabel Juarez considers the representations of the cactus, which appears as an icon in the Mexican flag, and the dahlia, named the Mexican national flower in 1963, to create imagined sculptures that portray a fusion of the two plants. “Dalia Azul (Winter),” for instance, resembles a type of cactus grafted with a dahlia in which the cactus cladodes are outlined with simplified leaves and flowers.




Anabel Juarez was born in Michoacan, Mexico (1988). Juarez and her Family immigrated to the Los Angeles Greater Area in 2003.  Having spent most of her formative years in Mexico, it's deeply vibrant and historical culture has greatly influenced her practice and artistic works. 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. She has exhibited her work in the Greater-Los Angeles Area in California, Paris, and Mexico. Also, her work is held in the permanent collection of the French National Ceramics Museum-Sevres. Juarez is the recipient of scholarships such as The UCLA Graduate Division Award, the UCLA Graduate Opportunity Fellowship Program Scholarship, and others.