Xochitla. Anabel Juarez

About

Five Car Garage and Lefebvre et Fils Gallery, Paris are delighted to present “Xochitla”  a  solo exhibition with Anabel Juarez ,  which is Nahuatl for “garden” or “place of flowers”. Juarez presents new large-scale ceramic sculptures that the artist developed from her interest in floral representation in Mexican culture. Civilizations  like the Aztecs cultivated and harvested several types of flowers for ornamental, religious, ritual, medicinal purposes, and often represented these flowers in stone and ceramics.

In her last two person show “Lente/Primavera” at Five Car Garage, Juarez created abstract and intimately scaled ceramic sculptures,  which alluded to the landscape through simplified forms and vivid colors. The Mexican landscape and native plants  have long been a subject for several Mexican artists who engage with identity through nature, in their work. For “Xochitla” Anabel Juarez considers the representations of the cactus, which appears as an icon in the Mexican flag, and the dahlia, named the Mexican national flower in 1963, to create imagined sculptures that portray a fusion of the two plants. “Dalia Azul (Winter),” for instance, resembles a type of cactus grafted with a dahlia in which the cactus cladodes are outlined with simplified leaves and flowers.