GISELA COLÓN

EFRAÍN LÓPEZ

PRIMARY FREQUENCIES 

March 20 -  April 26, 2025

NEW YORK, NEW YORK

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“As a child growing up among the rich biodiversity of Puerto Rico, I discovered that nature and even inanimate objects possess a vibrational frequency. This exhibition builds upon a storied legacy of groundbreaking shows, starting with Primary Structures in 1966 and followed by Primary Atmospheres in 2010. The term ‘Frequencies’ intentionally expands the dialogue to include environmental issues, vibrational resonance, and a deeper understanding of our interconnected world.” – Gisela Colón

 

New York, NY – Efraín López is proud to present Primary Frequencies, an intergenerational group exhibition featuring five female artists: Gisela Colón, Manuela García, Leslie Hewitt, Mary Miss, and Zilia Sánchez. Organized in collaboration with Gisela Colón, Primary Frequencies aims to redefine the boundaries of Minimalism by showcasing artists who expand and challenge our understanding of the movement. The exhibition will be on view from March 20 to April 26, 2025, with a reception taking place Tuesday, April 1, from 5:00 to 7:00 PM. Primary Frequencies and will include a text by Reilly Davidson.

 

The artists featured in this exhibition use fundamental forms to engage with the language of life and connect to the metaphysical realm. Zilia Sánchez’s oeuvre, marked by a distinctive confluence of organic and geometric forms, continues to resonate in works such as Concepto II (1998/2019). This pair of bronze sculptures showcases undulating, conical shapes that reflect the sinuous rhythms of the Caribbean landscape while alluding to the curvilinear forms of the human body. The interplay between reduction and sensuality, as well as restraint and expression, highlights Sánchez’s significant contribution to Minimalism, infusing the movement’s typical austerity with lyricism and biomorphic complexity. Mary Miss, a pioneering figure in Minimalist and Environmental art, is recognized for her innovative approach to spatial relationships and materiality.  Relief (1968) is characterized by its use of industrial materials and geometric forms, consisting of two black steel triangles suspended in precarious equilibrium. Their mirrored symmetry is underscored by the tension of their fragile balance on a wire tightrope, evoking an unsettling tension that teeters on the brink of movement. In Daylight/Daylong  (2022), Leslie Hewitt presents a series of diptych photographs that juxtapose sunrise landscapes with responses to Dan Flavin’s light installation, untitled (Marfa Project), 1996. Hewitt’s compositions invite viewers to engage with the works from multiple angles, refracting light, color, and image through a dynamic interplay of perspectives. Manuela García’s Doble Curva (2025) fluctuates between stark blackness and organic growth, reminiscent of the fluid motion of black volcanic lava spreading across the earth. The work’s reductive color palette and curvilinear shape evoke the primal movement of lava, while its simple, elemental composition reflects a Minimalist focus on the essential, the primitive, and the sublime. Gisela Colón’s Light Portal (Moonstone Labradorita) (2020) embodies her nuanced exploration of the intersections between landscape, materiality, and identity. By blending aspects of the luminous expanses of the Western United States with the geological richness of Puerto Rico, Colón’s work creates a symbiotic relationship between light, mineral, and body, subverting traditional notions of place and belonging.

 

Primary Frequencies posits that each artwork harbors a hidden reservoir of energy. The title encapsulates the exhibition’s essence: “Primary” signifies fundamental aspects, while “Frequencies” suggests the dynamic interplay of time, wave patterns, and vibrations. By embracing minimal vocabularies, this exhibition underscores the power of simplicity to convey complex and expansive ideas about life. It challenges and broadens the male-dominated canon of avant-garde movements and redefines the traditional boundaries of Minimal art.

 

Gisela Colón (b. 1966, Vancouver, Canada, raised 1967 San Juan, Puerto Rico; lives and works in Los Angeles, CA) is a Puerto Rican-American contemporary artist whose organic, totemic, light-activated sculptures and monumental environmental installations explore the complexities of human perception, inviting viewers to experience transformation in real time and space. Colón’s polymathic practice spans Minimalism, Light and Space, Environmental Art, and Land Art, with global projects in countries including France, The Netherlands, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Brazil, and Cuba, activating three UNESCO World Heritage sites. In 2024, Colón presented Máteria Prima, a solo survey exhibition, alongside Plasmático: El Cuarto Estado de Máteria, a large-scale environmental activation, at the Museu Nacional da República in Brasília, Brazil. Máteria Prima later traveled to the Instituto Artium da Cultura in São Paulo, Brazil (2024). Most recently, Colón participated in the XV Havana Biennial Horizontes Compartidos at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Cuba (2024).

 

Manuela García (b. 1982, Mexico City; raised in Medellín, Colombia; lives and works in Mexico City) earned her BA in Fine Arts from the National University of Colombia in 2007. She participated in the MA program in Visual Arts at the Brera Academy in Milan, Italy, in 2009 and holds an MFA from SOMA in Mexico City. García recently showcased her work in solo exhibitions at N.A.S.A.L. in Mexico City, Efraín López in New York, Peana Gallery in Mexico City, and Parsons Gallery in New York City. Her art has been featured in several museums, including the Raúl Anguiano Museum in Gaudalajara (2024), the Anahuacalli Museum in Mexico City (2023), the Fundidora Museum in Monterrey (2021), and the Chopo Museum in Mexico City (2015). 

 

Leslie Hewitt (b. 1977 in New York, NY; lives and works between New York, NY and Houston, TX) studied at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, the Yale University School of Art, and at New York University, where she was a Clark Fellow in the Africana and Visual Culture Studies programs. She was included in the 2008 Whitney Biennial and the recipient of the 2008 Art Matters research grant to the Netherlands. Recent exhibitions include the Dia Art Foundation, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Project Row Houses in Houston; and LA>ART in Los Angeles. Hewitt has held residencies at the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and the American Academy in Berlin, Germany amongst others.

 

Mary Miss (b. 1944, New York, NY; lives and works in New York, NY) is an American artist known for her pioneering contributions to Minimal, environmental, and site-specific art. She was also a founding member of the journal York, NY; lives and works in New York, NY) is an American artist celebrated for her pioneering contributions to Minimal, environmental, and site-specific art. She was a founding member of the journal Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics (1977–1993). Since the 1960s, Miss has created both interior and outdoor installations using simple materials such as wood, wire, rope, plastic, canvas, and glass, drawing inspiration from structures found in industrial settings. Her large-scale urban projects, developed from the late 1970s onward, emphasize the history, sociology, and ecology of each location. Notable works include South Cove (1984–87), a permanent public installation in Battery Park, New York. Recently, Miss’s work has been exhibited at the Nasher in 2023, the Aldrich Museum in 2022, the Nevada Art Museum in 2021, Thaddeus Ropac in both Paris and London in 2020 and 2021, the National Gallery of Singapore in 2018, and the Guggenheim Museum (Contemplating the Void) in 2010, among other venues. 

 

Zilia Sánchez (b. 1926, Havana, Cuba and permanently settled in San Juan, Puerto Rico in the early 1970s; d. 2024, San Juan, Puerto Rico) has been exhibited internationally since the 1950s. In 2017, her work was included in the 57th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, VIVA ARTE VIVA, curated by Christine Macel, and in 2024 was included in the 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere, curated by Adriano Pedrosa. In 2019, Soy Isla, a major solo exhibition of Sánchez’s work, was presented at the Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C. and toured to Museo de Arte Ponce, San Juan, Puerto Rico and El Museo del Barrio, New York. In 2024, Sánchez was the subject of the solo exhibition Topologías / Topologies at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami. Sánchez’s work is featured in public collections including the Centre Pompidou, Paris; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires, Argentina; Pérez Art Museum, Miami; Colby College Museum of Art, Maine; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico; Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico; Princeton University Art Museum, New Jersey; Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.; and Walker Art Center, Minnesota.​​​

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PRIMARY FREQUENCIES

 

Text by Reilly Davidson

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The mid-twentieth century Minimalism movement focused on uncovering fundamental truths, among other ideals. In the early 1960s, artists engaged with dramatically reduced forms to connect their objects to universal concepts, culminating in seminal exhibitions such as Primary Structures (1966) at the Jewish Museum, New York, and decades later, Primary Atmospheres (2010) at David Zwirner. By the late 1960s, a reaction against this movement began to emerge. Post-Minimalism, best understood as a period rather than a genre, is characterized by its multiplicity. Conceptualism, Body and Land art, Performance, and other related practices intertwine in a broader trend of moving art away from the confines of the white cube. In her 1966 essay “Eccentric Abstraction,” Lucy Lippard describes a particular cross-section of figures working within this ecosystem, noting that they “refuse to eschew imagination and the extension of sensuous experience while they also refuse to sacrifice the solid formal basis demanded of the best in current non-objective art.”

 

“Primary Frequencies,” an exhibition organized by the gallery in collaboration with Gisela Colón, expands on these historical frameworks through vital strategies that embrace a holistic approach to sculpture. An intergenerational group of women artists—Mary Miss, Zilia Sánchez, Gisela Colón, Leslie Hewitt, and Manuela García—broadens traditional boundaries of Minimalism by infusing it with ecological awareness, vibrational resonance, and somatic experience. Their works introduce new dimensions to the movement, merging materiality with environmental consciousness and exploring the emotional and spiritual resonance of materials and space. The connection between the works on view include a deep engagement with organic forms and energy transfers, sensitivity to perception, and the exploration of a distinctively post-Anthropocene landscape. Miss relates the built environment to its earthly context, just as the late Sánchez drew inspiration from her native and adopted homes of Cuba and Puerto Rico to inform the wave-like shapes in her sculptures. Colón systematically draws upon nature as well, responding to ancestral biological knowledge and the infinite possibilities of human perception. Hewitt’s diptychs that capture the evolving quality of light in West Texas as well as a fluorescent installation by Dan Flavin, are bound within artist-designed frames as a means to, in her words, “form a syncopation between light and color; past and present.” By tracing the threads between these artists, one’s relationship to land, sea, sky, and body is indelibly heightened.

 

Gisela Colón’s practice oscillates between the cosmos and the earth. She incorporates tenets from the Light and Space movement while maintaining her very distinct style of Organic Minimalism rooted in her deep experiences with a biodiverse natural world during her formative years in Puerto Rico. The forms of her sculptural works evoke the transformative energy found in nature, while their sleek surfaces allude to space age aesthetics and reimagined futures. Light Portal (Moonstone Labradorita)’s vertical format is at once somatic, industrial, and otherworldly. Merging the sublime light conditions of the Western United States with Puerto Rico’s rich mineral geology, , this work explores the intersections between landscape, materiality and identity, subverting traditional notions of place and belonging.

 

The work of Zilia Sánchez occupies a similar territory. The artist consistently positioned dichotomous principles within the same arena; Interiority and exteriority, empirical knowledge and metaphysics, as well as dimension and flatness are just a few of the collapsed binaries that persist in Sánchez’s oeuvre. The artist’s three-dimensional “paintings” also function as wall-bound sculptural interventions. Through the undulating topographies and consideration of light and shadow, Sánchez ultimately referenced the female figure and abstract precepts through her dimensional canvases. All of the competing forces and paired dualities are set together in order to achieve “aesthetic equilibrium,” in her words. The present sculpture, Concepto II, was envisioned in 1998 and completed in 2019. In keeping with Sánchez’s usual considerations, its contours suggest a relationship to the human form rather than a complete divergence from it, while also referring to the soft ripple of a wave pattern.

 

The “Daylight/Daylong” series was inspired by Leslie Hewitt’s time in Marfa, Texas where she participated in a residency at the Chinati Foundation. She was inspired by the particularities of the sun’s movement across the Southern sky and Dan Flavin’s untitled (Marfa Project), 1996, a permanent light installation that is deeply intertwined with its context. For each “Daylight/Daylong” work, these two elements converge in framed diptychs, sparking perceptual versatility. The resulting objects are optically confounding, engaging perspectival dynamics while approaching the edges of the sublime through their connection to luminescence and abstraction.

 

Manuela García’s Doble Curva oscillates between sturdy and delicate, with two sheets of paper joined together by a central hinge that allows for its wall-mounted display. This sculpture fundamentally explores spatial negotiations, as its volume significantly outweighs its corporeality. Doble Curva becomes a butterfly poised for flight or perhaps the flexible pages of an open book. Its seemingly endless abstract possibilities affirm its effectively nebulous status.

 

Environmentally oriented, Mary Miss’s repertoire stems from her dual considerations of site and object. Ronald J. Onorato perfectly encapsulates the essence of her creative methods, stating that Miss’s works“chart a more thorough multi-sensory experience, the apprehension of space.” Relief, from 1968, is on view here, demonstrating the artist’s skillful use of materials and concern for installation. Its organizational methodology (a thin wire that is counterposed, yet also attached to the more substantial steel triangles) is a precarious demonstration of spatial and geometric constraints, as well as the possibility of integrating the art object with its environment.

 

Primary Frequencies posits that each artwork serves as a reservoir of potential energy. When dissected, the words in the exhibition's title reflect the ethos of the works on display; something that is “primary” is considered basic or fundamental, while “frequencies” suggests the passage of time, wave patterns, and general vibrations. The artists in this show thus demonstrate the crossroads between temporality, life, and essential forms.

 

Reilly Davidson

 

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