Virginia Jaramillo: Principle of Equivalence

Virginia Jaramillo: Principle of Equivalence is the first major retrospective and largest monographic exhibition to date of the work of Virginia Jaramillo (b. 1939, El Paso, TX; lives in Hampton Bays, NY). Principle of Equivalence traces the artist’s practice from the mid-1960s through the present, featuring more than 40 abstract paintings and handmade paper works that reveal her long-standing preoccupation with the relationships between the earthly and metaphysical realms.

Taking shape in New York and Los Angeles of the 1960s and 1970s—amid mass political movements and heated debates in the art world around representation and the relevance of painting—Jaramillo’s work has long engaged with the formal and social potential of abstraction. Drawing on a continued study of physics, science fiction, mythologies, and modernist design, Jaramillo’s work reaches for the fundamentals of comprehension: how our experience of the physical forms the basis of ideas, and how abstraction can offer alternate ways of understanding our world. Alongside her iconic Curvilinear series, the exhibition features works made during her decades-long collaboration with the Dieu Donné Papermill in New York, as well as a series of recent works that follow Jaramillo’s return to painting on canvas, furthering her long-standing interests in quantum physics, geography, and time.

Virginia Jaramillo: Principle of Equivalence was originally organized by Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, Missouri, and curated by Erin Dziedzic, Director of Curatorial Affairs. The MCA’s presentation is organized by René Morales, former James W. Alsdorf Chief Curator, and Iris Colburn, Curatorial Associate.

This exhibition is presented in the Bergman Family Gallery on the museum’s second floor.