María Fragoso Jara: Bodas de Sangre

Exhibition Dates: November 2 - December 16, 2023

Opening Reception: Thursday, November 2nd @ 6PM-8PM

39 White Street, Tribeca

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1969 Gallery is pleased to present Bodas de Sangre, María Fragoso Jara’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. Created over the last year at the Silver Art Projects Residency in 4 World Trade Center, this exhibition is made up of eight paintings, six works on paper and one sculpture.

Fragoso Jara's paintings are linked by a red thread that connects, binds, holds and dissolves. Flowing like a trickle of blood, coagulating into a fence, or wrapping around a finger like a nuptial ring, the thread is at once tenuous and powerful. It can be a vein, an umbilical cord, a lock of hair or a ribbon. Taken together, the paintings of this series constitute a ceremony where rituals of both love and death intertwine. Fragoso Jara creates a tension between hieratic stiffness and complete fluidity. Animals, humans, and plants, immobilized in a pose, share common features. The dogs’ skins like the texture of the quail eggs’ shells, the characters’ aquiline noses like the birds’ beaks, the topiaries swollen like breasts: at once sacrificing and sacrificed, devoured and being devoured.

The two Xoloitzcuintles dogs in the middle of the triptych Léa y María: hortus conclusus are simultaneously guardians of the garden and witnesses to the procession of figures. Traditionally, in Aztec mythology, they also accompany the dead in the afterlife (Mictlán). Their nipple-studded breasts amplify the sexual dimension of their function as witnesses, “testigo” in Spanish, from which the term “testicle” derives. Xolos were eaten at banquets and were considered such a special delicacy that they symbolically stood for cannibalism. In another painting, de la leche, the Xolos hence reappear in an edible but also highly sexualized form, the nipples/testicles having multiplied on the surface of a bread-like creature.

The sexual dimension is also religious: de la leche is a mode of representation of the virgin (virgen de la leche), an iconographic theme like that of Parto (virgen del parto). In Madonna del Parto, the woman bent forward by pregnancy or curiosity, plunges her fingers into a heavy, visceral flow of hair. Fragoso Jara’s works expose the interior of the body like a paradoxically soft, clean shell. Outside and inside merge: ribbons like veins intertwining, a tear in the fabric like a gaping wound, a heavy braid lying cut like a handful of tripe. In Jillian, the opening allows a glimpse of the entrails like a window onto a red, uniform, soft landscape. The figures stand in front of the fence in bas-relief, clinging to the grates by a bloody thread that winds sensuously up the fence like a vine. The tension between inside and outside, continuity and its solution create an entanglement between the characters in the paintings. They stand isolated and yet deeply involved with one another, caught as they are in a complex web of friendship, intimate passion, profound fears, love and unreciprocated love and its agonies, biting into one another, stealing a piece of flesh, devouring it and sharing it and giving it away.

In this body of work, María Fragoso Jara’s paintings represent a moment of suspension in the celebration: animals, humans, and plants are all swollen by fluids, their skin taught by pulsating life, as the celebration is just about to begin or to explode – but holding still.

- Léa Jouannais Weiler, 2023

María Fragoso Jara (b. 1995, Mexico City) lives and works in New York, NY. She earned a BFA from the Maryland Institute College Art (MICA) in Baltimore. Fragoso Jara is represented by 1969 Gallery, where she had her first solo exhibition El jardín entre tus dientes in 2021. Other recent exhibitions include I'm Stepping High, I'm Drifting, and There I Go Leaping, Xiao Museum, China; Iώ, Cassina Projects, Milan, Italy; Friend Zone, curated by Vaughn Spann, Half Gallery, New York, NY; A Very Anxious Feeling: Voices of Unrest in the American Experience (20 Years of the Beth Rudin DeWoody Collection), Taubman Museum of Art, Roanoke, Virginia; and Fragmented Bodies II: Fluidity in Form, albertz benda, New York, NY. Recent art fairs include Material Art Fair (Peana, Mexico City); Untitled Art Fair Miami Beach 2021 and 2022 (1969), and The Artsy Vanguard, Miami Beach, 2021. Her residences include Silver Art Projects, New York, NY in 2022 and 2023; along with Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Yale Norfolk School of Art, Vermont Studio Center Fellowship and Palazzo Monti. Fragoso Jara’s work has been acquired by Xiao Museum of Contemporary Art, Rizhao, China, The Hort Collection, Beth Rudin deWoody, Peter and Michelle Scantland, and John Marquez and Stephanie Thomas.

For inquiries, please contact: 

Quang Bao | e: quang@1969gallery.com

Madeline Ehrlich | e: madeline@1969gallery.com

About 1969 Gallery

Founded in September 2016, 1969 is a contemporary art gallery in Manhattan’s Tribeca neighborhood. Through solo / group / external exhibitions and art fair presentations, the Gallery has cultivated the careers of its represented artists and a broader community of artists primarily devoted to painting.

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