Ambar Quijano

15/03/2024

💫 Dear friends, I’m thrilled to announce the official opening of the Ambar Quijano gallery space in Mexico City!

As we prepare for this exciting new chapter, I am also looking to expand our team. If you or someone you know is interested in joining us, please send your CV to [email protected] to receive the full job description, including salary and benefits. Your help in spreading the word would be greatly appreciated!✉️⚡️

After undergoing surgery in December 2023, taking some time off to focus on my physical and mental health became a priority. While I’ve missed fully engaging here, I’m excited to be almost ready to return full-force, with key upgrades to our exhibition programme as well as art advisory services, paired with more commitment and passion than ever!🤗❤️‍🔥

I can’t wait to share more details on our upcoming exhibitions and projects with you. By the way, our new gallery space in Mexico City opens mid-May this year so keep an eye out for our next show as well as the official date for our grand opening!

Thank you for your continued support and encouragement, it means the world to me!🤍

With love,
Ambar

30/04/2023

❤️‍🔥I’m thrilled to share that ‘FUTURE PARADISE’, James Watkins’ first solo exhibition in Mexico will be opening this Saturday the 6th of May at our exhibition space Casa Astrónoma. ❤️‍🔥Please stop by and say hi if you’re in Mexico City!

UK-born and New Zealand-raised, James’ latest paintings are imbued with a reverence for the natural world, his new home in Latin America and the art of ancient civilisations. Developed during this last year whilst living in Mexico, this body of work is rich with fauna, flora and fingerprints where seed-spreading hands meet celestial bodies, precious stones and metaphorical offerings of abundance. 🤲🏽🌿

Watkins’ work exists as a physical record of both his bodily exertions and extended contemplative journeys, narrated by layer upon layer of energetic mark-making that embraces both primal and childlike sensibilities. Returning to the same canvas over extended periods of time: scraping, sanding, abandoning, adding and subtracting allows the disclosure of subtle variations where the painting develops unique histories and unpredictable interactions. With traces from the past still visible in the present, Watkins exposes previous versions of the paintings and himself, with his work taking on an archaeological attitude, both to the surface of his paintings and his subconscious.⚒️✨

We are also excited to be collaborating with two great Mexico-based brands for the opening of this exhibition, .mx & 🙌🏽

Feel free to email me at [email protected] if you’d like to receive a preview or more information. ✉️

With gratitude 🤍
Ambar

contemporaryexhibition artist

17/04/2023

🌟These three paintings by are currently showing in our online exhibition ‘Nature Holds a Mirror’ (link in bio). Through painting, sculpture and animation, Alexandra Levasseur's work depicts images that speak of a balanced, symbiotic relationship between humans and nature. Her use of ceramics (clay) not only adds sculptural elements to her paintings but reinforces the work’s relationship with the natural world and stands as a solidified imprint of human presence. ✨

Combining painting and ceramics in a unique way, Levasseur creates dramatic surfaces that provide both two and three-dimensional experiences. With our contemporary lifestyles becoming ever more digital and disconnected from the natural world, Levasseur presents us with tranquil vistas and harmonious environments where human beings, fauna and flora exist together, connected and in balance. 🙌🏽

Influenced by physics, mythology and the dreamscapes of symbolism, Levasseur is also a big proponent of biophilic ideas. A concept born from building design to increase occupant connectivity to the natural environment through the use of plants and natural forms, in an effort to enhance the psychological well-being, mood and life of the occupants. In this way, Levasseur’s work actively seeks to elicit appreciation and uplift the spirit of those who come into contact with it.⚡️

18/03/2023

16/03/2023

Our upcoming online show ‘Nature Holds a Mirror’ (launching next week) will feature three works by the amazing Ellen Siebers whose emotive paintings examine and explore visual dualities– inlaying (often through bevelled interventions) and pairing together images in inseparable dialogue.⚡️

Based in Hudson, New York, her works hint at the indefinable poetry of life and love, underpinned with reverence (and references) to art history and a sense of the interconnected nature of all things– primarily the blurred line between our psychological and physical experiences. Her paintings are based around direct and confident brushwork, rendering imaginative and vibrant compositions that pull the viewer into emotional vignettes that simultaneously appreciate the sensuality of our natural world, whilst recognising our presence here together, as much a part of nature as anything else. 🌱✨

If you’d like more information please contact me at [email protected] 💌, I’d be delighted to connect with you.

August I, 2021
Oil on bevelled birch panel
30.5 x 30.5 cm

15/03/2023

✨ We’re excited to be showing this gorgeous work from Puerto Rico-based artist ​​Armig Santos in our online show ‘Nature Holds a Mirror’ which launches next week! Santos’ paintings transport those who come into contact with them into emotional landscapes, full of reverence for the natural wonder and lifestyle of his homeland, combined with a window into troubling elements of its history.

Santos’ work is also currently on view at the in ‘No existe un mundo posthuracán: Puerto Rican Art in the Wake of Hurricane Maria’ an exhibition organized to coincide with the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Maria.

If you’d like to receive a preview or more information about Armig’s work, please contact me at [email protected] 💌

Armig Santos
Untitled (Sunrise and Rain), 2022
Oil on canvas
76.2 x 101.6 cm

03/03/2023

This exquisite oil on marble sculpture by Sebastian Hidalgo is part of our current show ‘Nature Holds a Mirror’ (expanded)! Sebastián’s work explores his interest in natural forms, subconscious messaging and the tension between memory and imagination. Creating surfaces and three-dimensional objects where countless narratives can exist.

Hidalgo leaves behind a sense of seriousness and presents gentle windows of imagination that transport the viewer somewhere else– an unspecific, ambiguous place that exists with a kind of warm openness to create multiple possibilities. 💭💫

01/03/2023

The relationship between ‘s compelling sculpture and ‘s meditative painting is one of our favourite moments from our current exhibition ‘Nature Holds a Mirror (expanded)’ which is open until Saturday. ⚡️

We are having a closing gathering this Saturday if you haven’t had a chance to visit yet, we’ll be starting at 4pm and we’re looking forward to gathering together! 🎉

Photo:

27/02/2023

❤️‍🔥We’ve really enjoyed having daily visitors through Casa Astrónoma and we’ve met so many beautiful and interesting people these last few weeks! For this reason, we’re very pleased to announce we’re extending our exhibition ‘Nature Holds a Mirror (expanded) for one more week! 🎉We’d also love to invite you to Casa Astrònoma for our closing gathering this Saturday (4th of March) from 4pm. The space will be also open from Tuesday if you can’t make Saturday and want to come see the show.

We’re so grateful to all the amazing participating artists who have made this exhibition such a success!

Wishing everyone a great week and looking forward to seeing anyone who hasn’t had a chance to visit us in Escandon yet!

📍Casa Astrónoma
62 Astrónomos, C
Escandon II, CDMX

Gracias to for these amazing install shots!

23/02/2023

✨ These two wonderful mixed-media works by Mexico City-based artist Isabella Russo Siqueira are currently part of our exhibition ‘Nature Holds a Mirror’. Isabella embraces a multidisciplinary approach to her practice that sees her working across a range of mediums to explore the materiality of object and surface– often utilising and reconstituting found materials as a point of departure for her work. Her abstract paintings are alive with movement, organic traces as well as ever-unfolding energetic gestures and marks – reflected through her repetition of line, natural forms and her playful use of layers, colours and textures. Staying open to opportunity and chance allows her work a sense of open self-discovery, as her paintings evolve naturally, Russo gives herself a platform to respond to her inner world as well as her surroundings, in this way her paintings develop with a sense of intuition, impulse and immediacy.

Having been born and raised in Mexico and in close relationship to the natural world, Russo’s work consciously and unconsciously celebrates this innate connection and mirrors the constant change, healing and development that can in many ways be found in nature. Russo also welcomes the use of unexpected mediums for her paintings, including natural dyes and pigments such as turmeric, wine, beet and hiciscus water and in combination with the traditional mediums of acrylic paint and oil pastels. Russo integrates these multiple interests and mediums to create her own vision where fluid lines meet painterly abstract realms and textures. The resulting paintings are celebrative ecosystems full of sensitivity and introspection; psychological spaces that find harmony in the maelstrom and encourage appreciation where a balance between something familiar and something to discover comes to the surface. 🤍💫

"Mi jardín de flores
Mixed-media on repurposed fabric
80 x 53.5 cm

2. "Frenesí, 2022
Natural dye, acrylic and oil pastel on canvas
70 x 75 cm"

22/02/2023

✨Maria Conejo’s painting ‘El regalo’, which is currently on view out our exhibition Nature Holds a Mirror (expanded), depicts an alternative narrative around Genesis and Adam and Eve. Maria inserted her headless female characters into this narrative to focus on the body (and her body) and subverts the traditional reading by placing her figures in the context of a mystical night where they are visited by the snake of wisdom instead of the snake of temptation. The snake, rather than introducing sin, is actually delivering the gift; the gift of of pleasure, acceptance and freedom followed by their world, the world they knew, turning into flames for a new world of emancipation to be born.🧡

The exploration of her own mythology makes up an exciting element of Maria’s incredible practice which also incorporates drawing, painting, large-scale murals and ceramics– portraying her relationship with her body and sensuality via dramatic corporeal works that feel both fantastical and transcendental. Nourished by ongoing research into the body, sexuality and the iconography that has been generated throughout history to represent and address these issues (she is also the co-founder of Pussypedia / )– Maria continues to peel back the layers of herself and history, to establish a new visual vocabulary of femininity for the 21st century.🙌🏽

Maria Conejo
El regalo, 2021 Acrylic on canvas
100 x 150 cm

21/02/2023

⚡️This intriguing sculpture titled ‘Placer culposo’ by Mexico-based sculptor Trubaik is currently on view at our show ‘Nature Holds a Mirror (expanded) in our exhibition space Casa Astrónoma in Mexico city!

Trubaik is an artist who works in a variety of materials and scales, from large outdoor sculptures, interactive and public installations as well as intricate and fragile ceramic and epoxy resin pieces that reference femininity, the natural world and organic forms. Her work offers alternative and hybrid forms– futuristic species that had had to mutate in order to survive or even ancestral organisms that were fossilized.🌪️

It’s the atemporal dimension that her works evoke which unfolds powerfully, as it leaves room for the imagination to travel to a range of spaces for reflection, narrative building within the multiple as well as the idea of world making and the possibiliies within that. ‘Placer culposo’ is a work that embodies a range of tensions and exists between the beautiful, the seemingly dangerous, the resilient and the fragile.🍃

Trubaik is also drawn to questionioning our current relationship with Nature, in a world dominated by cities and industry, she is interested in reflecting upon the entire process that exists in order for us to consume or acquire any produce and all of the ‘inbetweens’ from seed to digestion. With this in mind Trubaik highlights the bridge between nature and culture which is intrinsically connected to the way various indigenous cultures perceived and continue to perceive culture and nature as part of each other, as part of the whole.🎴

Placer culposo, 2021
Lacquer, epoxy resin and ceramic
15 x 15 x 21 cm