VIRGINIA JARAMILLO

This will be the artist’s first show with Pace since she joined the gallery’s program in 2022 and her first-ever solo exhibition in LA. Titled East of the Sun, West of the Moon, the presentation will spotlight nine new paintings—all deeply related to Jaramillo’s past bodies of work—in which the artist examines ancient mythologies and civilisations.

Throughout her six-decade career, Jaramillo has explored the visual and imaginative possibilities of geometric abstraction. The artist’s work is guided by her deeply philosophical approach to art making, and her methodological process often involves meditations on history, science fiction, scientific theory, and other subjects. She transforms exacting sketches into transcendent paintings, using a language of abstraction to explore relationships between physical, temporal, and spiritual phenomena.

Born in El Paso, Texas in 1939, Jaramillo, a Mexican American artist, has been cultivating her practice since her childhood in Los Angeles, where she attended Manual Arts High School—artists Jackson Pollock and Philip Guston are also alumni of that institution—and studied at the Otis Art Institute from 1958 to 1961. Jaramillo’s visits to designer Charles Eames’s studio during her high school years would remain an enduring source of inspiration for her own work throughout her career. Among the earliest milestones of her career was her inclusion in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s Annual exhibition series in 1959 and 1961. Influenced by abstract expressionist paintings and modernist design, Jaramillo would continue to pursue explorations of form and function over the course of her career.

Jaramillo first garnered wide acclaim for her curvilinear paintings, her most famous body of work, which she began creating in the late 1960s following her move from Los Angeles to New York—after a year living in Paris—and continued producing into the 1970s. For these and later works, the artist drew inspiration from her high school visits to designer Charles Eames’s studio as well as the Japanese concept of Ma, which centres on the resonance and significance of negative space. Her curvilinear works were included in the storied 1971 De Luxe Show in Houston, which was among the first racially integrated exhibitions in the United States—Jaramillo was the only woman included in that show—and the 1972 Whitney Annual at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Notably, the Whitney recently added a 1967 curvilinear painting by Jaramillo to its permanent collection.

The new paintings in Jaramillo’s upcoming exhibition with Pace in LA build on her longstanding experimentations with materiality through various media, textures, pigments, and technical processes. These works also reflect her continued investigations into the sensorial effects of colour and line.

With East of the Sun / Deep Field (2022)—one of the works included in the upcoming show in LA—Jaramillo elaborates on the visual language of her iconic curvilinear paintings, which feature elegantly contoured lines that diverge and intersect against vast, monochromatic colour fields. In this painting, the artist situates her linear abstractions amid a deep blue background rich in textural nuance.

Also included in the exhibition is the large-scale work To Touch the Earth (2023), in which linear forms traverse three distinct fields rendered in metallic hues. Here, Jaramillo’s abstractions coalesce in a dynamic, symmetrical composition. The painting Meta (2023) is a study in balance and structure, with two delicate lines floating parallel to one another amid four square elements.

During the run of Jaramillo’s solo show at Pace in LA, the artist will open her first major museum retrospective at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City, on view from June 1 to August 26. Titled Principle of Equivalence, this exhibition will bring together 73 paintings and handmade paper works created by the artist over the course of nearly 70 years. Yale University Press will publish a full-colour catalogue in conjunction with the retrospective.