Baoying Huang, Alexandria Mento, Nina Molloy, Cate Pasquarelli

Raul De Lara handcrafts wooden sculptures that often uncannily depict household objects and the natural world. He imbues these works with a poetic symbolism inspired by his experience as an immigrant from Mexico and as a DACA recipient. Growing within these confines, De Lara feels a kinship with potted plants. They too have been uprooted, and although they are unable to put roots into the ground, they are still growing. The artist intentionally includes superficial cracks in his wooden pots to imply the possibility of breaking free from these confines. Two of the sculptures in this show are of monstera plants. Their leaves are based on his own houseplant and the native monsteras he saw while visiting Mexico City. Speaking about “the personality that develops within plants if you take good care of them,” De Lara considers how plants “bear witness to the ups and downs of life.” Amplifying this anthropomorphization, his sculpture Familia features five leaves that each represent a member in his family. Here, the leaf body symbolizes a human body. His work balances poetic political messages with exploring the beauty and mystery of the natural world and the mundane.

Also inspired by their experience as an immigrant, Shanique Emelife paints scenes of their parents’ homes in Nigeria that are animated by their imagination and stories they have heard from their family. With intentional thin layers of paint applied with thin brushes, Emelife begins by grounding these fictions in reality. They first paint the landscape and architecture based on the photographs they took on a recent trip to their parents’ Nigerian villages. The characters manifest intuitively as they find, in their words, “who belongs in that space.” Sometimes the figures in their paintings are clearly visible. In others, a spectral form is implied with minimal mark making, such as in their painting The Door, where a faint translucent outline of a figure endures in the center of the doorway. With the figures and landscapes enlivening Emelife’s compositions, the artist builds a sense of home from feeling and memory, as to them, home is a “transient, internal space,” as opposed to an external foundation.

Tahnee Lonsdale paints transcendental groupings of simplified feminine bodies who gather closely and fill up most of the space in the composition. Their bodies are often interlocking, as some figures are transparent and affect the colors and light of the figures around them. This results in shapes and light that resemble those of Paul Klee. She achieves this through continuously applying, in her words, “gossamer thin, barely-there paint layers, until an apparition becomes apparent.” This process of lightly applying paint gives way to the beings’ density in the same way that an open mind allows the artist to access this mystical realm. Only select details are revealed, such as nearly uniform eyes, hands, and feet. But resonant moods of connection and interdependent histories are conveyed through their colors, slight gestures, and vibrating textures. The figures exist in an often open undefined space that also pulses with similar colors and textures, infusing the beings with a ghostly translucency. Yet, the artist’s beings are alive in her mind, perhaps as guardians who inspire the wonder of nature.

Sihan Guo’s ethereal abstractions present a harmonic system that balances the relationships between the digital and the natural worlds. Approaching this mediation with both hope and anxiety, she begins with a mixture of paint that allows intentional drips, harnessing and embracing uncertainty. The drips create, in her words, “swirling, stem-like, web-like textures that suggest an unregulated flow of energy across a rimless, de-centered structure of reality. This echoes Deleuze’s theory of the Rhizome,” which refers to a multiplicitous, interconnected network. Painting while the drip layer is still wet, Guo generates glowing, organic shapes that may resemble a figure. These ghostly, bodily forms bubble to the fore of the disintegrated space and abruptly dissolve into a sea of melting abstraction. Her subdued color palette—featuring colors such as grays, dusty lavender, slate blue, and ochre—resembles those of a deserted city, where the metallic and concrete structures are crumbling below emergent nature. Here, symbiosis between the digital web-like structures and the natural world surfaces in a representation of, in her words, her “vision of post-human and post-digital organisms.”

Press Release by Kirsten Cave

Raul De Lara, Shanique Emelife, Sihan Guo, Tahnee Lonsdale will run at Alexander Berggruen (1018 Madison Avenue, Floor 3) from December 11, 2024–January 15, 2025. The exhibition’s preview is available upon request. For all inquiries, please contact the gallery at info@alexanderberggruen.com.

Shanique Emelife
Ifee’s Fear, 2024
oil on wood panel
24 x 36 in. (61 x 91.4 cm.)

Four Artists Dismantle the Boundaries of “Immigrant”

HYPERALLERGIC

Raul De Lara, Shanique Emelife, Sihan Guo, and Tahnee Lonsdale challenge conservatism through explorations of migration, spirituality, and interconnectedness.

The works in this exhibition collectively dismantle the boundaries imposed by the narrow designation of “immigrant” in the United States, embracing instead a globalized, interconnected ethos. De Lara’s wooden monstera sculptures signify both personal and ecological migration, while Emelife, Lonsdale, and Guo explore the interplay between human and transcendental forms, challenging Western spiritual and cultural binaries. Together, these artists offer a dynamic rebuke to the conservative ideologies of their surroundings, asserting the enduring strength, complexity, and beauty inherent in their lived experiences and work.

December Shows to Close the Year and Open the Next

ELEPHANT MAGAZINE

At the Artists Talk for the end-of-year show at Alexander Berggruen, exhibitors Raul De Lara, Shanique Emelife, Tahnee Lonsdale, and the gallery’s director in the place of Sihan Guo (currently in Shanghai) gathered to reflect on their work. Highlights of the show include the “female tribes” of Lonsdale’s practice, as she termed the figures at the talk. Working in the realm of feminine lifeforms that veer into the angelic or ethereal (with the smallest of eyes), her ghostly representations are the result of layers of thin paint, washed onto canvases in progressive strokes to broker the creation of vibrant, veiled apparitions. Additional notice is warranted for De Lara. His unmistakable walnut sculptures are rendered in deep, earthy curves against the flashes of vibrant color on the wall’s paintings. De Lara, a DACA recipient from Mexico, explores how plants “bear witness to the ups and downs of life,” as show notes read, using this exploration into potted plants as kindred symbolism for his personal journey with mobility.