Cris Worley Fine Arts is pleased to announce the upcoming exhibition of Adrian Esparza, Emerging from Space. The exhibition will open with an artist’s reception on Saturday, May 20th, from 5-8 pm, and will run through June 17th. This is the artist’s third solo exhibition with the gallery. The event is free and open to the public.

For more than 20 years the traditional Mexican sarape has served as the main ingredient in Adrian Esparza’s brightly colored, wall mounted constructions. Combining high and low aesthetics and utilizing the deconstructed yarn, these geometric forms are inspired by a variety of sources: landscape, architecture, object, individual. At the heart of each of these works, is an exquisite pen on paper drawing, rendered in full color on a ghostly grid.

Emerging From Space, is Esparza’s first exhibition at Cris Worley Fine Arts to include works in a variety of media: six works on paper, one monumental sarape construction, and the introduction of an entirely new body of work — sarape paintings. For several years, Esparza experimented with new modes of painting (in one iteration he rendered fields of geometry entirely of colored sand) but the sarape — the symbol of his cultural heritage, has emerged in a new way in the form of painting. Here, Esparza employs an interesting interplay of adductive and reductive techniques, first adding yarn to panel, but then obscuring it entirely with paint, only later to reveal the elusive, chromatic pattern by burnishing back the topcoat. The result is a satisfying combination of formal and conceptual concerns with a decidedly curious outcome.