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Jeffly Gabriela Molina, Suspiro: Kavi Gupta | 835 W. Washington St. Chicago, IL, 60607

Past exhibition
10 February - 17 March 2018
  • Overview
  • Works
  • Installation Views
  • Press
Overview
Jeffly Gabriela Molina Cena Familiar en Celebracion de la Caida de Maduro, 2017 Oil and graphite on linen 48” x 56”
Jeffly Gabriela Molina
Cena Familiar en Celebracion de la Caida de Maduro, 2017
Oil and graphite on linen
48” x 56”

Kavi Gupta presents the first major solo exhibition of paintings by Venezuela-born, Chicago-based artist Jeffly Gabriela Molina.

 

Molina’s paintings wrestle with the alchemy between seeing and feeling—that is to say, between precise optical perception and the fleeting moments of memory and emotion that fill everyday life. Each composition is an amalgam of poetry, memory, personal experience and communal relationships—a metaphysical data point; a captured glimpse of a half-remembered day dream.

 

Born in San Cristóbal, the capital city of the Venezuelan state of Táchira, Molina first remembers asking for paints at age five. She moved around frequently as a child, living at times in Colombia, at times in Venezuela, sometimes in the city, and sometimes in the country. Instability taught her to embrace the beauty of the moment. “My art has always been about that which surrounds me,” she says. “My experience toward beauty is something I carry with me.”

 

Like Marianne Moore, Molina’s favorite poet, who was known both for imaginative language and precise diction, Molina developed an aesthetic position that is both poetic and structured. Her work is haunting, dreamlike, and conceptually open—yet meticulously constructed and thought out.

 

She is inspired by the challenge of expressing ideas, which are inherently abstract, as pictures, which are inherently concrete. She strives to make each picture come alive, so viewers will see in it something that reminds them of themselves.

 

Structurally, the hard-edged diagonals, shadows and light, isolated figures and architectonic spaces in Molina’s compositions evoke comparisons to the chiaroscuro works of Metaphysical painter Giorgio De Chirico. Her oft-anonymous figures might be at home in a Surrealist landscape or a Dada-ist collage, except these figures are not alienated or lost—they are rather introspective, or perhaps bemused. They are caught in moments of contemplation, imagining where they fit in to the flow of time. Says Molina, “The silhouettes are sometimes empty to avoid specific identity references. They are not white, black, male, female, whatever. They are human.”

 

Pattern is also essential to Molina work. Like Pattern and Decoration artists in the 1970s and 80s, Molina reclaims beauty and the decorative motif as an expression of the highest beauty, and of the existential harmony between humanity and nature. Whether used in the background, or as substance filling the voids of figures and forms, patterns hint at personal history, at fragments of memories, or at the unseen aspects of life.

 

Molina moved to Miami, Florida, in 2007, intent on learning to speak English so she could study art. She began her art studies in a community college in Miami. In 2011, she transferred to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), where she earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 2013, and her Master of Fine Arts degree in 2016. This is her first exhibition at Kavi Gupta.

Opening Reception: February 10, 5-8pm, artist talk at 7pm.

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Works
  • Jeffly Gabriela Molina Cena Familiar en Celebracion de la Caida de Maduro, 2017 Oil and graphite on linen 48” x 56”
    Jeffly Gabriela Molina
    Cena Familiar en Celebracion de la Caida de Maduro, 2017
    Oil and graphite on linen
    48” x 56”
  • Jeffly Gabriela Molina El Bello, 2017 Oil and graphite on linen 20” x 20”
    Jeffly Gabriela Molina
    El Bello, 2017
    Oil and graphite on linen
    20” x 20”
  • Jeffly Gabriela Molina El Bello (ii), 2017 Oil and graphite on linen 20” x 20”
    Jeffly Gabriela Molina
    El Bello (ii), 2017
    Oil and graphite on linen
    20” x 20”
  • Jeffly Gabriela Molina I Miss You, 2017 Oil and graphite on linen 44” x 44”
    Jeffly Gabriela Molina
    I Miss You, 2017
    Oil and graphite on linen
    44” x 44”
  • Jeffly Gabriela Molina Mirror, 2017 Oil on linen 54 x 54 in 137.2 x 137.2 cm
    Jeffly Gabriela Molina
    Mirror, 2017
    Oil on linen
    54 x 54 in
    137.2 x 137.2 cm
  • Jeffly Gabriela Molina Niño que Nace Barrigón, Ni que lo Fajen de Chiquito, 2017 Oil and graphite on linen 38” x 34”
    Jeffly Gabriela Molina
    Niño que Nace Barrigón, Ni que lo Fajen de Chiquito, 2017
    Oil and graphite on linen
    38” x 34”
  • Jeffly Gabriela Molina Present Company: A Pretentious Pony & an Opera Singer, 2017 Oil and graphite on linen 54” x 54”
    Jeffly Gabriela Molina
    Present Company: A Pretentious Pony & an Opera Singer, 2017
    Oil and graphite on linen
    54” x 54”
Installation Views
  • Jeffelymlinasuspiro835 3
  • Jeffelymlinasuspiro835 1
  • Jeffelymlinasuspiro835 2
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  • Jeffelymlinasuspiro835 10
  • Jeffelymlinasuspiro835 11
  • Jeffelymlinasuspiro835 5
  • Jeffelymlinasuspiro835 12
  • Jeffelymlinasuspiro835 14
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  • Jeffelymlinasuspiro835 22
  • Jeffelymlinasuspiro835 18
  • Jeffelymlinasuspiro835 20
  • Jeffelymlinasuspiro835 24
  • Jeffelymlinasuspiro835 23
  • Jeffelymlinasuspiro835 17
  • Jeffelymlinasuspiro835 21
  • Jeffelymlinasuspiro835 25
  • Jeffelymlinasuspiro835 26
Press
  • Jeffly Molina Suspiro at Kavi Gupta | Washington Blvd. 2018

    JEFFLY GABRIELA MOLINA’S ‘SUSPIRO’ AT KAVI GUPTA, CHICAGO

    Blouin ARTINFO, January 30, 2018
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Kavi Gupta | Washington Blvd

835 W. Washington Blvd. Fl 1-3 Chicago, IL 60607

Hours | Tue–Fri: 11 am–6 pm, Sat: 12 pm–5 pm

Kavi Gupta | Editions

835 W. Washington Blvd. Fl 2 Chicago, IL 60607

Hours | Tue–Fri: 11 am–6 pm, Sat: 12 pm–5 pm

 

 

Kavi Gupta | Elizabeth St

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