Two for the Show: Colors Converge in Joint Exhibit at Anya Tish

THIS WEEKEND, A new show goes up at Anya Tish Gallery. Dialogues: A Convergence of Color and Form features works by Colombian-born painter Tatiana Escallón and sculptor Marisol Valencia, who hails from Guadalajara, Mexico. Escallón’s large-scale abstract paintings are filled with color and action, and Valencia’s twisted and folded porcelain and steel sculptures are just as beautiful as they are unsettling. While each artist explores wildly different mediums of expression, hot-blooded emotion is contained in the colors they choose and the forms they create. The show opens Friday, Jan. 12, and both artists will be present.

This isn’t the first time Escallón has shown at Anya Tish. Last summer, two of her paintings, “La Fiesta (The Feast)” and “Voz de Mujer (Woman’s Voice),” were included in Strike the Match! — a sensuous, all-too-brief pop-up exhibit of Texas-based female painters curated by Tish and gallery director Dawn Ohmer. Both of those paintings began as original poems, and throughout her work, words in both Spanish and English share space alongside harried-looking dots, dashes, and longer lines, not unlike the emotive, gestural work of such abstract expressionist heavies as Helen Frankenthaler and Cy Twombly. Using acrylics, oils, graphite, and materials such as rope and wood, Escallón conjures a form of assemblage that is closer to alchemy than collage.

Valencia has lived in the United States since 2004, and recently completed the Block XXI program at the Glassell School of Art and was awarded a certificate of achievement for her studies in ceramics. Her new series of sculptures Ways to Endure is the result of her experimentation with the physical properties of porcelain, and a comment on how we endure or crumble in the wake of tragic circumstances. Each sculpture begins with an ordinary cardboard box as its armature, which Valencia covers with a porcelain slip, and then fires at an unusually high temperature. Out of this unusual but methodical firing process unpredictable cracks, textures, and deformations occur, as each box crumbles or collapses entirely.

Dialogues: A Convergence of Color and Form is on view through Feb. 24.