NOW REPRESENTING SALOMÓN HUERTA

Harper’s is pleased to announce the representation of Los Angeles-based artist, Salomón Huerta. Huerta’s third solo exhibition with the gallery, Pool Paintings, is on view at Harper’s Chelsea 512 through March 30. The artist was also included in the gallery’s recent Art SG presentation and is featured in Crescent Heights, on view at Harper’s Los Angeles through April 13.

Throughout his career, Huerta’s incisive command of observational painting has seen no bounds. He uses oil painting to experiment with portraiture at large, capturing figures, objects, and landscapes. In doing so, he mines the art historical canon and references aesthetic traditions ranging from classicism to modernism. 

Huerta often turns to the human figure to experiment with these visual legacies. In recent work, he renders the Chicano community in which he was raised in East Los Angeles with shadowy contrast and palettes reminiscent of Baroque painting. Other times, the artist engages in conversation with modernism, illustrating classical nude sculptures inspired by the likes of twentieth-century artists such as Auguste Rodin.

This intra-aesthetic dialogue persists within his portraits of objects and landscapes. In a series produced in 2022, Huerta juxtaposes threatening guns with innocuous midday snacks across striking still-life paintings. The jarring scenes invoke the tension of mortality present in seventeenth-century Flemish painting. Transporting viewers to the twentieth century, Huerta flirts with abstraction within his landscapes. He renders pristine houses and swimming pools with the even temperament found in immersive abstract color field painting. Huerta’s artistic range is thus manifold: the artist’s rigorous investigation of form and tradition provokes studied compositions, teeming with historical memory and disciplinary expansion.

Salomón Huerta, Untitled (Pool), 2023, oil on canvas, 60 x 48 inches

Salomón Huerta (b. 1965, Tijuana, Mexico) received a BFA from Art Center College of Design in 1991, and an MFA from UCLA in 1998. Most recently, his work has been the subject of solo presentations at Harper’s, New York and East Hampton (2024, 2023, and 2022); Louise Alexander Gallery, Porto Cervo, IT (2021 and 2019); California Lutheran University, Thousand Oaks, CA (2020); Gallery Vacancy/ltd los angeles, Shanghai (2019); Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, Mexico City (2018); There There Gallery, Los Angeles (2018); and Christopher Grimes Gallery, Santa Monica, CA (2014). Throughout his career, Huerta was included in notable group presentations including Home—So Different, So Appealing, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles (2017); Transactions: Contemporary Latin American and Latino Art, Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego (2006); Retratos, El Museo del Barrio, New York, San Antonio Museum, San Antonio, and National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC (2005-6); Lateral Thinking: Art of the 1990s, Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego (2002); Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2000); and LA Current, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (1999 and 1997). His work has been acquired by numerous institutions including Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Reviews of his work have appeared Artforum, Art in America, and BOMB, among other publications. Huerta lives and works in Los Angeles.

Salomón Huerta: Pool Paintings, Harper's Chelsea 512 (2024)

Salomón Huerta: Pool Paintings, Harper's Chelsea 512 (2024)

Salomón Huerta: Pool Paintings, Harper's Chelsea 512 (2024)

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