Kutlesa is pleased to present The Nurturing Wild, an exhibition of new paintings by the New York-based painter Tania Marmolejo. This is the artist’s first solo exhibition with Kutlesa.

Spurred by the intrinsic connection between femininity, nature, and nurture, Tania Marmolejo's works reflect on the relationships and power play between these forces. To what extent is femininity shaped by nature and to what extent by nurture? Can society’s rigid standards in fact be “nurturing” toward femininity with their prescriptive parameters? Is femininity in its unadulterated, unrestricted state cyclical, transformative, and nurturing; or akin to something more wild and unbridled? Untethered and unpredictable? Even dangerous? And if so, dangerous to whom?

Marmolejo’s paintings feature female figures enveloped within these unresolved questions and liminal states, at times happily immersed, at others embroiled in palpable tension. Her subjects' unblinking expressions and enormous eyes hesitate to fully let in the viewer, but any perception of vacancy is more illusion, or careful ruse, than fact-- their giant pupils functioning like blackened mirrors, illuminating the observer’s inability to possess or influence them through projection or assumption.

On her canvases, landscapes and environments become expressions of expansive potential and even manifestations of complex emotional inner worlds. Marmolejo’s paintings capture the intricacy and mystery of the natural world, as much as they touch on the experience of the feminine: monumental, yet still deeply intimate.

—Sabrina Tamar