Opening: 12.07.2012 @6pm
Exhibition on view until 06.09.2012
Location: Sàn Art
3 Me Linh
District Binh Thanh
Ho Chi Minh City

Sàn Art presents the solo exhibition of contemporary established Colombian artist, Ms Luz Angela Lizarazo, as part of ‘Irregular Hexagon: Colombian Art in Residence’, an art project curated by José Roca (Adjunct Curator, Latin American Art, TATE Modern, London, UK), co-produced by Fundación Gilberto Alzate Avendaño (ascribed to Bogotá’s Culture, Leisure and Sports Secretariat) and the Colombian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Exhibition opens Thursday 12 July, 2012 at San Art at 6pm.

Luz Ángela Lizarazo makes drawings, objects and installations that speak to the feminine condition, the fragility of life, vulnerability and the need for protection. The domestic realm appears as a recurring theme in her work, as do crafts traditionally associated with women like sewing or knitting; images such as flowers and birds; jewellery techniques like lost-wax casting; and delicate materials like porcelain, glass, gauze and human hair. But her images, paradoxically, are not “feminine” in the stereotyped sense of the term, revealing themselves as deeply disturbing and not complacent. In her more recent works that will feature in ‘Irregular Hexagon’, Lizarazo creates drawings based on the intricate patterns of gratings used to protect windows and doors; these forms are blown up to architectural proportions with stencils and applied to walls, or used in windows to create interplays of light and shadow; sometimes collecting actual gratings and piecing them together into large sculptural objects.

‘Irregular Hexagon: Colombian Art in Residence’ consists of six distinct one-person exhibitions of artists from Colombia, which are hosted by six institutions, located in places as diverse as Morocco, Israel, Australia, Turkey, Singapore and Vietnam. Each artist does a three-week residency at two of the spaces, and each space hosts two artists over the course of a year. These short-term residencies will provide the artists a unique opportunity to engage with the local context, its cultural particularities, its language and its images, subsequently contributing to the creation of additional new work for the exhibition realized at the respective host site. Curator of the project, Mr. José Roca states: ‘[‘Irregular Hexagon’] wants to give visibility to a group of Colombian artists that have already an important body of work, establishing partnerships with independent spaces that have residency programs. This will provide a rare opportunity to engage with the local public, beyond the opportunity to show the work.’ Other participating artists include Mateo López, María José Arjona, Gabriel Sierra, Delcy Morelos and Johanna Calle.

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“As an artist, my experience in Vietnam has been short but enriching. Going around the city and seeing the way of life of the Vietnamese people has brought new elements to my work, as plastic bags that can contain everything from fish to medicine to coffee – this has inspired me to put my found drawings (discovered in Ho Chi Minh City and Bogota) in plastic bags like a Vietnamese market. I have also been excited to see the decorative iron gates in this city, for these barriers have been so influential for me in my thinking of fear and fragility and I am happy to be including their patterns in my ongoing ‘Lattice’ series. The richness of different cultures living together and offering an incredible variety of color and materials where everything is possible has inspired in me a new way of doing a work of art that is more subtle and ephemeral”.

Luz Angela Lizarazo, July, 2012