This painting by Clare Rojas (b. 1976, USA) is emblematic of Rojas’s instantly recognizable visual voice. Partly pulled from her intuition and partly inspired by visual cues in her everyday environment, her abstracted shapes and forms almost become protagonists within Rojas’s compositions. This impasto work is rugged and austere, evoking a sense of strength and recognition of the painting as a formal object.

Rojas is among the most influential artists of her generation. Her multifaceted visual language—which is informed by a dynamic range of influences, including Post Modernist abstraction, classic portraiture, and narrative storytelling—transcends limiting descriptions such as objective versus non-objective. Her imagistic painted worlds welcome an ever evolving cast of elements that add myriad layers of possible meaning to the work.

Rojas’s work has been exhibited extensively in such vital institutions as the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL; San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, CA; Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, CA; Headland Center for the Arts, Sausalito, CA; Centre for Contemporary Arts (CCA), Glasgow, Scotland; Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, PA; Watari Museum, Tokyo, Japan; Museum Het Domein, Sittard, Netherlands; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, León, Spain; Knoxville Museum of Art, Knoxville, TN; Savannah College of Art and Design, Savannah, GA; and Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington, DE; among many others.