Tatjana Pieters is pleased to invite you to A passing cloud the third solo exhibition by Mexican artist Elizabeth Ibarra at the gallery, presenting new paintings, sculptures & textile works.

Ibarra’s creative explorations take form in painting, works on paper, mixed media, sculptures and assemblages. Through bold colours and expressionist gestures, Ibarra’s work refers to ideas of life beyond Earth and is unified through a sense of magic and haunting. Her pictorial representations of the figure are recognisably human but they also bare a strangeness, an unidentifiable alien nature. In doing so, Ibarra conjures a hybrid form of human and alien life and through gestural brushstrokes she gives them a sense of movement and brings these bodies to life. Ibarra’s hybrid forms could represent extraterrestrial beings, the experience of being a foreigner with an outside perspective or simply the feeling of loneliness.

Ibarra regularly accompanies her work with personal writings taking inspiration from life:

A passing cloud
is
a red elephant riding a tiny pink car,
a pig,
a crocodile eating a dragon,
a mouse on top of a castle,
a long ship;
a passing cloud could be anything
a quick thought,
a n idea,
a story changing every second.
a cloud looking like a perfect cloud,
a surface to rest from the weight of gravity,
a spectacular show of luminosity,
a respite,
a life.

(Elizabeth Ibarra)

Generally known for her paintings & Sunday Findings, assemblages of tree branches, for ‘A Passing Cloud' Ibarra premieres paintings on loose canvas and sculptures made from old paint brushes. The artist never likes to throw away things. She grew up having enough or not enough, so the brushes were born of not wanting to throw them away when they couldn’t be used anymore. Later the brushes became her son’s mobile. He loves them.

Ibarra likes how a painting that is not stretched, looks like a tapestry if just pinned to the wall. When the winds comes in the house where she lives, it makes those paintings come to life. They gracefully lift off the wall. In her bedroom growing up, Ibarra had a tapestry her grandma’s sister made for her and that she really loved. Without planning it, the artist made something that made her feel as good as that tapestry. On some of them she added some stitching which makes them feel even more homely to her.However they are interpreted, Ibarra’s works are sensitive yet satirical in their mystical nature and provoke questions about human existence on planet Earth. Although her work bares resemblance to modern masters such as Joan Miro, Louise Bourgeois, J. M. W. Turner as well as a nod to Romanticism, Ibarra did not undergo a formal education. Instead, her stylistic development was independent and inspired by the connectivity and simplicity of images and cosmology.