Cris Worley Fine Arts is pleased to announce our first solo exhibition with El Paso-based artist, Adrian Esparza entitled, Dual. This will be the artist’s first solo exhibition since the gallery began representing him in the spring of 2016. Dual will feature Esparza’s latest renowned geometric constructions in yarn. The exhibition will open with an artist’s reception on Saturday, March 30, 2019 from 5-8 pm, and will be on view through May 4, 2019 (extended through June 15).

Adrian Esparza first drew international attention through his postmodern repurposing of the traditional Mexican sarape, a kind of physical metaphor for the artist’s own cultural transmutations. In 2003, then Associate Curator of Contemporary Art, Suzanne Weaver, included Esparza in the seminal Come Forward: Emerging Art in Texas exhibition at the Dallas Museum of Art, where a large audience was first introduced to the border-based artist. Over the last decade, Esparza’s powerful, yet delicate blanket-derived yarn constructions have evolved into geometric forms with ties to minimalist artists like Kenneth Noland, Agnes Martin and Ellsworth Kelly. These wall-dependent works often reference architecture, the landscape, or “alien” shapes, depicting dramatic one and two-point perspectives to form striking dimensionality and volume.

Adrian Esparza received his B.F.A. from the University of Texas at El Paso and his M.F.A. from California Institute of the Arts in 1998. Artist residencies include Art Pace in San Antonio and the Border Art Residency in La Union. Esparza’s textile pieces travel the globe through exhibitions in the following museums and galleries: Rufino Tamayo Museum of Contemporary Art, Mexico City, Mexico; Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix, AZ; Houston Center for Contemporary Craft, Houston, TX; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; The Kentucky Museum of Art and Craft, Louisville, KY; Cincinnati Contemporary Art Center, Cincinnati, OH; Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX; Museo del Barrio, New York, NY. Since 2016, The Dallas Museum of Art has featured Esparza’s pieces through the C3 Visiting Artists Project. Esparza’s works reside in the permanent collections of multiple museums including the Dallas Museum of Art, the El Paso Museum of Art, and the Perez Miami Art Museum as well as in many additional prominent private and public collections .