Talley Dunn Gallery

Paintings is Morales’ first exhibition with the gallery and features six monumental oil paintings, a large-scale drawing, and intimately scaled studies by the Nacogdoches-based artist. The subjects of these portraits, deftly grand and stately with pathos, are immigrants and manual laborers—among them, the artist’s friends and family. Morales’ masterful command of her painterly technique is manifest in her reverently attentive treatment of her subjects’ faces, revealing emotional complexity and psychological depth. These works intimate a sincere understanding and connection between the artist and her subjects. Morales’ compellingly austere and quietly chromatic compositions carefully depict figures at work, evincing affective truths of the human condition.

picklock manual is a solo exhibition showcasing compositionally and chromatically exquisite works by acclaimed Swiss painter Pia Fries. Fries’ seemingly spontaneous gestural paintings are, upon closer examination, prismatic collages of paint and printing techniques. Rich and vibrant striarated sweeps of impasto leave textured trails of color across the stark white surface of the paintings. Layers of varied techniques such as screen prints are superimposed over or obscured by other floating elements of line and color. Consisting of mixed media paintings from interrelated series produced at different points in the artist’s career, this exhibition offers a lush look at the artist’s continued formal concerns as well as the development of her oeuvre. Experimenting with notions of the original, the copy, and even with painting itself, Fries’ work is a lively investigation of the dynamic possibilities of painterly intervention.