Diana Guerrero-Maciá: PAINTINGS FOR BIRDS
Current exhibition
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Diana Guerrero-Maciá
THE BIG ONE, 2024Dye, canvas, deconstructed clothing, cutter quilt, and Belgian linen
56 x 48 inches
57.75 x 49.75 inches, framed -
Opening reception: Friday, January 17, 5-8PMWe are pleased to announce our first exhibition of 2025, Diana Guerrero-Maciá: PAINTINGS FOR BIRDS. This exhibition marks Chicago-based artist Diana Guerrero-Maciá’s third solo show with SECRIST | BEACH. On view will be a suite of ten new paintings, a series of large works on paper, and a salon installation that includes a sound work created in collaboration with Joseph Adamik. PAINTINGS FOR BIRDS is presented in conjunction with FOLDS, a survey invitational featuring 15 artists.
Guerrero-Maciá’s post-disciplinary approach to image-making embraces the rejection of traditional ideas around the division of artistic disciplines. Instead, techniques from a variety of methodologies are combined to create a flexible approach for new ideas. With a formal approach to abstract concepts from an art historical direction, these works live at the intersection of pictorial space and textile consciousness. In other words, they are artworks that are yes/and, rather than either/or. They are works of art that don’t check a box; they are not quilted nor painted, they are something else in-between, they are new ideas, as Guerrero-Macia calls them: unpainted pictures.This new series of patchwork colorfields evolve from traditional designs that date from the early 19th century quilting techniques: the Nine Patch, Flying Geese and Solmon’s Puzzle. Using this as a template imbued with an art-historically relevant post-painterly abstraction rigor, Guerrero-Maciá’s “paintings” present luscious palettes on seductive tactile surfaces.With a keener eye, viewers will note that the dedicated embrace of abstraction explores the lived experience. This includes ideas around market consumption, sustainability, and the migration of people that are expressed through color and form. Here, the combination of historical standards with contemporary quandaries strongly suggests that the dynamic between yesterday and today is a fluid reminder that tomorrow is daunting yet exciting. -
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THE BIG ONE’s composition references quilting. The postdisciplinary tenet of Guerrero-Maciá’s practice incorporates textiles into her work, breaking conventions of image-making on a flat surface. With strong colors and a black-and-white off-center ‘midline’ of sorts, there is a quaint asymmetry that creates a harmonic relationship between color, texture, pattern, and alignment. Beyond the center of the piece, the traditional quilting structure goes awry, and in that juncture, Guerrero-Maciá delineates the limit to which traditional quilting can serve her work. The assemblage is both floating and tethered—sitting between a quilt as a tangible object and a pictorial plane as visual art.
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Diana Guerrero-Maciá
SOUTH-SOUTH, 2023Dye, canvas, deconstructed clothing, and deadstock wool, and button
56 x 48 inches
57.75 x 49.75 inches, framed -
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Diana Guerrero-Maciá
Paintings for Birds no. 3, 2024Gouache, paper, and archival inkjet print on paper on Lanaquarelle paper
26.5 x 23 inches
28 x 24.5 inches, framed -
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Diana Guerrero-Maciá
NOMAD no. 2, 2024Dye, gouache, canvas, army blanket, and deadstock wool, feather and driftwood
56 x 48 inches
57.75 x 49.75 inches, framed -
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Guerrero-Maciá’s NOMAD no. 2 incorporates found pieces of driftwood and a feather into her matrix of fabrics. Hiding amongst the pattern, these objects allude to voyage, discovery, and change. Guerrero-Maciá introduces these elements, insistent on subjectivity, into the grid, challenging conventions of abstraction. Wood, feathers, and fraying and dyed fabric, with signs of weathering and use, are suggestive of migration and the natural world. These relics are juxtaposed against—but balanced with—the abstraction of rectangular, solid blocks of color.
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Diana Guerrero-Maciá
TREE no. 1, 2023Dye, canvas, deconstructed clothing, and deadstock wool
56 x 48 inches
57.75 x 49.75 inches, framed -
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Diana Guerrero-Maciá
GLAZIER no. 1, 2024Dye, gouache, canvas, deconstructed clothing, cutter quilt, deadstock wool, and buttons
56 x 48 inches
57.75 x 49.75 inches, framed -
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Guerrero-Maciá’s unpainted pictures evoke the structure of a nostalgic gaze onto picturesque landscapes, possibly out of a gridded window pane. In GLAZIER no.1 Guerrero-Maciá organizes her plane with perpendicular lines and subtle diagonal rhythms. Decidedly flat, with objects such as buttons from a garment, the rectangular ‘window panes’ become sites to envision the lived world. Guerrero-Maciá’s use of found materials within unpainted pictures allows her to explore what can be generated at the intersection of abstract forms and the material world.
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Diana Guerrero-Maciá
NOMAD no. 1, 2023Dye, gouache, canvas, deadstock wool, towels, and driftwood
56 x 48 inches
57.75 x 49.75 inches, framed -
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Diana Guerrero-Maciá
PARLEY no. 2, 2024Dye, gouache, canvas, deadstock wool, towels, drop cloths, and buttons
56 x 48 inches
57.75 x 49.75 inches, framed -
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Diana Guerrero-Maciá
CLOUDS, 2024Dye, canvas, drop cloths, deconstructed clothing, deadstock wool, and buttons
56 x 48 inches
57.75 x 49.75 inches, framed -
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Diana Guerrero-Maciá
PARLEY no. 1, 2024Dye, gouache, canvas, deconstructed clothing, towels and flag
56 x 48 inches
57.75 x 49.75 inches, framed -
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As some of Guerrero-Maciá’s artworks seem to traverse the natural world, PARLEY no. 1 is among those that appreciate the social and industrial histories of textile—textile consciousness. This branch of materiality considers consumption, waste, and both cultural and personal sentimentality of the use—not only appearance—of textile. Guerrero-Maciá activates her objects beyond simple planes of color through remnants of folds on the fabric swathes, stray fibers, exposed stitches, and used towels. From afar, a consistent pattern and strong red hue unify the piece, but up close, the variance in texture begs imagination and memory.
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Diana Guerrero-Maciá
TREE no. 2, 2023Dye, canvas, deconstructed clothing, and deadstock wool
56 x 48 inches
57.75 x 49.75 inches, framed -
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Photo by Clare Britt
