Artist: Virginia Chihota

Nicola Vassell presents an exhibition of new work by Virginia Chihota, the artist's first solo presentation with the gallery. Spanning works on paper and large-scale canvases, the artworks on view synthesize a fluid exchange between media—screen printing, drawing, and painting—that meld into a single, embodied practice that allows the artist to explore profound questions of being, belonging, and the mutability of self.

Chihota’s intuitively driven practice is defined by what she describes as a sustained act of listening. For the artist, the studio is not a place of production, but rather, one of attention and mutual exchange. Human forms, color, and line emerge gradually as the artist rejects a single predetermined image. Instead, Chihota approaches the canvas directly, following contours as they surface, layering and listening until the work signals its own completion. By accompanying the line, Chihota defines her own path of self-discovery. This intuitive methodology—which the artist describes as a conversation with the work, conducted both audibly and internally—creates a deep sense of freedom in the conception of each piece that captures Chihota’s ever-evolving personhood. The final works represent animated, living interventions that serve as a material manifestation of the artist’s process, which is reached only through personal introspection and spiritual attunement.

Central to Chihota’s practice is the fluid interplay between printmaking, drawing, and painting. Trained as a print-maker, the artist originally felt constrained by her own medium. Through a process of experimentation, Chihota’s printmaking became an entry point to painting. Her brush began to feel lighter and more liberated as she attempted to mirror the immediacy of her drawing practice, slowly building her relationship to canvas. The resulting works offer a sense of continuous unfolding through textured layers of ink and paint that build upon each other, transforming each picture into a semiotic site for accumulated meaning and embodied experience that allows Chihota to further approach her own sense of being. This introspective self-excavation is particularly visualized through the presence of the human figure in varying states of emergence and dissolution, creating a gradation of adaptable selves within each canvas.

Significantly, the artist has led a life defined by relocation, having experienced numerous moves across the world over the years. Within this state of flux, Chihota’s work has served as a source of stability through which she can deeply interrogate her own existence. As such, the monumentality of her canvases, which envelop the body of the viewer, transform into expansive sites for contemplation. In fact, the artist describes each painting as a room, a fluid space within which she exercises full authority. With each line, gesture, and brushstroke, Chihota actively creates a room of her own.

Nicola Vassell Gallery extends its sincere thanks to Schwartzman& and Tiwani Contemporary for their support and strategic collaboration in making this exhibition possible.