SEPTEMBER 17 – NOVEMBER 6, 2024

Exhibition Opening with the Artist
Tuesday, September 17, 5 - 7 PM

SOCO Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of Stem, a solo exhibition by artist Clare Rojas featuring new oil paintings on panel and paper. The gallery will host a public opening reception with the artist on Tuesday, September 17th from 5 - 7 PM. This will be the artist’s third solo exhibition with the gallery and will coincide with Rojas’ solo exhibition, Clare Rojas: Past the Present, at the Bechtler Museum of Modern Art in Charlotte, NC which runs from September 21, 2024 - January 19, 2025.

Stem focuses on the motif of flowers. Rojas’ practice encompasses many styles from narrative figuration to surrealist abstraction and eco-feminist magic realism, but flowers have long been paramount in her oeuvre. In the exhibition, the artist’s empowerment of the feminine appears in the form of floral imagery and suggestions of the female body. 

Through a meditation on line and color, Rojas situates herself amongst artists like Van Gogh, O’Keeffe, Picasso, etc. who centered much of their work on the dynamic symbolism found in buds and stems. Rojas’ flowers are powerful, poised, and witty. They become characters of their own, dominating her compositions with charm.

The majority of the exhibition consists of small and intimate works on paper. In Black bird with three stems, a bird reaches with its feet and long beak to grasp three narrow stems featuring large red and orange petals amongst a blank background. The works on paper in Stem are linked by the raw quality of Rojas’ materials. Her paper is as much part of the composition as is her application of oil paint.

The largest work in the exhibition, Heavy Flowers, depicts a full vase leaning against a stack of books on a table adorned with a smooth rock that prevents the vase from falling. In front of the books, an open journal lists things like “clapping, rain, metal clanking, USA USA USA, man screaming, and crying.” Round blue petals fall from the flowers onto the tabletop, symbolic of the loud and heavy topics listed. Like many of Rojas’ compositions, the viewer feels implicit in the scene, as if the person writing in the journal just stepped out of the room.  

One of the many impressive elements of Rojas’ work is its connection to folklore and mythology. The artist’s symbols and visual language are historical yet entirely her own as shapes and iconography flow from one composition to the next. There are subtle references to her own life and the landscape that surrounds her studio, resulting in the works becoming somewhat autobiographical while also staying deeply rooted in the natural world. 

Clare Rojas (B. 1976)

Clare Rojas (b. 1976, Columbus, OH) is in the permanent collections of MoMA New York; SFMOMA; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco; Orange County Museum of Art, CA; San Jose Museum of Art, CA; Berkeley Art Museum, CA; Smart Museum, University of Chicago; Columbus Museum of Art, OH; Progressive Art Collection, Cleveland; Dakis Joannou Collection, Greece; and Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León, Spain. She has been awarded grants and residencies from Artadia, Eureka Fellowship, Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, Joan Mitchell Foundation, and the Headlands Center for the Arts. In 2024, Rojas will be the subject of a solo exhibition at the Bechtler Museum of Modern Art, Charlotte, North Carolina. She has enjoyed previous solo exhibitions MCA Chicago; IKON Gallery, England; Museum Het Domein, Netherlands; Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, MA; Savannah College of Art and Design, GA; Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita, KS; Knoxville Museum of Art, TN; Belkin Satellite, Vancouver; CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art, San Francisco. She has a BFA in printmaking from Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA in painting from School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Rojas lives and works in Northern California and is represented by Jessica Silverman, San Francisco; Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York and SOCO Gallery, Charlotte, North Carolina.