Anat Ebgi is pleased to announce Wish You Were Here, a group exhibition featuring works by Hernan Bas, Alejandro Cardenas, Hulda Guzmán, Soumya Netrabile, and Caroline Walker. The exhibition will be on view July 24 – September 11, 2021 at the gallery’s 6150 Wilshire Blvd location.
Sending a postcard is a romantic gesture. The customary sign off, ‘wish you were here,’ is a conjuring, a way to share your joy with someone far away. Although they can also serve a commemorative and memorializing function—depicting iconic landmarks or exotic destinations. They are tokens of nostalgia, sentimentality, and longing for something absent. The artists in Wish You Were Here present views into the realm of the psyche, portals that meditate on the slipperiness of reality, and contemplative explorations of daily life, transcendence, and fantasy.
Hernan Bas’ works investigate self-reflection, desire, and obsessions that invite the viewer to recognize their own curiosities and oddities. His work frequently depicts adolescent male figures, such as in A gathering of minds (the agoraphobic), which depicts a solitary blonde boy stuck at home, surrounded by his only company—classical busts and flourishing potted plants. The highly expressive portraits balance emotional realism with dreamy romanticism.
The ethereal scenes depicted in Alejandro Cardenas’ paintings evoke a world in transition. Inspired by the post-modern architectural environment of his youth growing up in Miami, Cardenas builds a whole universe of possibility and narrative depth. In these works, statuesque androgynes pose in private soliloquy near ledges, windows, and cutouts that open up to infinite expanses of still turquoise waters.
In the paintings of Hulda Guzmán, humans, animals, and fantastic creatures alike, act out the giant drama of life. Across the canvases, her subjects dance, lounge, dream, and play in modernly furnished interiors and verdant landscapes. The artist blends reality with illusions of fantasy, drawing from both her imagination as well as her natural surroundings within the Dominican Republic.
Working intuitively, Soumya Netrabile channels her subconscious and mines memories from nature walks to create her paintings. In The Turning, an azure peacock struts through a vivid and atmospheric field of majestic color. A forest of green, amber, and peach, surrounds a bear facing off with a hiker, in The Encounter, each dwarfed by swirling flame-like brushstrokes. Netrabile dissolves real space into lyrical abstraction, uncovering poetic and spiritual connections to landscape.
Caroline Walker’s quiet, intimate portraits blur boundaries between public and private scenes. Working from her own photographic source material, the female subjects in her compositions are seen from a vantage point through windows or from behind fences. This voyeuristic approach emphasizes the distance between viewers and the anonymous women depicted resulting in rich emotional scenes with narrative tension.
