"Regen Projects is pleased to present Altanera, Preciosa y Orgullosa, New York-based artist Aliza Nisenbaum’s first exhibition with the gallery and in Los Angeles. The exhibition will feature a new body of work depicting dance troupes, studios, and teachers local to Southern California, including Teresita de Jesús of Studio 10, Folklorico Revolución, Mariachi Tierra Mia, and Amelia Muñoz Dancers. Informed by her origins in Mexico and prior work with immigrant and diasporic communities, Nisenbaum’s lively compositions exemplify the artist’s dedication to fostering connection and community in the space of painting.
An early, leading figure in the centrality of representation and portraiture in the preceding decade, Nisenbaum develops vibrant, figurative paintings through a form of participatory observation. She forges relationships with her subjects and connects meaningfully to the complex communities they create together. Informed by a diverse array of artistic and political traditions, Nisenbaum’s pictures (and the process through which they are made) recall forebears such as Alice Neel, Sylvia Sleigh, and Diego Rivera.
The exhibition’s title, Altanera, Preciosa y Orgullosa, draws from “La Bikina,” an iconic Mexican ballad, and describes the song’s namesake subject, a “haughty, gorgeous and proud” woman. As such, it alludes to the sounds and sentiments that might accompany the dancers and musicians pictured throughout Nisenbaum’s paintings, as well as her overarching interest in depictions of female power, independence, and self-assuredness. These themes recur in La Bruja, a painting of dancers learning to carry lit candles safely atop their heads as they dance to lyrics that describe a witch, or “bruja,” at work in the middle of the night. For Nisenbaum, La Bruja, like “La Bikina,” evokes a powerful mythology of strong women, informed by their own agency and control as they move through the world.
Poised and focused, The Ankle Strap, introduces us to a dancer as she closes the clasp on her shoe, attentive especially to the most decisive details. Likewise, Nisenbaum’s paintings orchestrate a carefully calibrated concert of humming patterns and colors, from the rhyming latticework of tights to the gauzy curtains that drape and cocoon the rooms, the lacey fretwork of leotards and costumes, and the pronounced grain of the wooden floors. Animating and unbridled patterning recurs across the canvases, a painterly translation of the energy of the dancers and the spirit of their music. Just as the women tap more and more frenetically in La Bruja—building and accelerating—the pattern that frames them expands through and beyond the figures, likening the sonic experience to this visual effect, as well as the pace of paint handling that produces it."
-Regen Projects
September 12 – October 26, 2024
For more information, click here.
Oil on linen
66 x 57 x 1 1/2 inches (167.6 x 144.8 x 3.8 cm)
Photo: Pauline Shapiro
