Hales is thrilled to announce the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum's acquisition of Virginia Jaramillo's Birth of Venus, 1975.
Birth of Venus (1975) is part of a body of work referred to as the Stained Paintings, in which Jaramillo challenged herself to pursue a new painterly technique. An intuitive way of working, painting in semitransparent veils, rotating and tilting the canvas allowed for the paint to move freely. Each new layer would begin along the lines of where the underneath layer of paint had dried. Jaramillo likens the formation of shapes in the paintings to that of stacked stones of ancient sites, structurally holding each other up. Controlling her use of color, the Stained Paintings are exemplary of an early use of earth tones, reminiscent of scorched ground, mud, hazy heat and luscious fields. The embedding of color into the canvas creates deep, sensory space - the resulting experience transports the viewer beyond the painted surface, evoking cosmic or metaphysical planes of existence. In Jaramillo's work multiple cosmologies exist, and the titles she assigns to the canvases take inspiration from Greek mythologies, pre-Hispanic and non-Western systems of organization.
Birth of Venus will be included in the group exhibition Sensory Poetics: Collecting Abstraction at the Solomon R. Guggenheim from 8 July 2022, organised by Joan Young.
Virginia Jaramillo
Birth of Venus
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
1071 5th Ave
New York
NY 10128
United States
