Artist’s Reception, Saturday, Oct. 20, 6-8pm

Couturier Gallery is honored to present “Especimenes / Specimens”, Elsa Mora’s first show in Los Angeles, California. “Especimenes / Specimens” is a compilation of works in multi media that reflect the subtlest aspects of being a woman. It is a show about women, about women with children and those who have none, it is about life, it is about death and about nature and is also about things that have no name. The exhibition of installations, assemblages, sculptures, paintings and drawings will open on October 20 and continue through December 1.

Especimenes/Specimens is a compilation of works in a variety of mediums, including clay, photography, metal sculptures, shaped paper, oil paint, ink and graphite. One theme Mora’s works addresses is women of distinction and leaders of humanity. The show’s eponymous installation piece (Especimenes / Specimens) is made up of 100 handmade butterflies each head bearing the photographic image of a famous woman displayed as one would a collection of butterflies-pinned to a wall, a curious collection of rare “insects.”

Mora’s works are usually a compilation of many materials – found objects, handmade objects forged clay/metal/plastics, photographs – which she forges into keenly crafted and elegant pieces. The pieces titled “Tijeras” (Scissors), 2001, a series of seven scissors made entirely of porcelain, describe the fragility of their existence as well as the impossibility of their function given that the blades all terminate in unexpected knots, spoons or plant forms suggesting the difficulties and multi-tasking expected of women.

The ironically-titled series “Second Nature” include ceramic sculptures of organic specimens resembling internal organs, plant and sea forms which speak of the obvious and the not-so-obvious themes of fertility and domesticity…displacement and separation (these latter two an extension of Elsa Mora’s experience not only as a woman but, more specifically, as a contemporary Cuban woman and its accompanying socio-political complications). The works in both these series are assemblages of years of collecting materials:

“(…) Elsa is one of those artists who constantly saves things. For her, there is no disposable object; everything can be re-used in a renewed and coherent style. That is why she resists limitations and assumes the risk of foraying into all visual media, from the most traditional ones such as painting, drawing, ceramics or sculpture to her most recent use of digital photography. She is an artist who works without prejudices; everything can be used and whatever it is immediately becomes larger than life, creating a personal mark in exceptional works that have penetrated important international art circuits.”
- Magda Gonzalez, Independent Curator and Art Critic, Havana, Cuba

Elsa Mora, born in Holguin, Cuba (1971) and now residing in Los Angeles, began her artistic career in Cuba in the late 1980’s. Her work has been in galleries and museums throughout the world including Museo de Bellas Artes de la Habana, Havana, Cuba; Metropolitan Museum of Tokyo, Japan; Arts Museum, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art. State University of New York New Paltz, New York; McDonough Museum. Youngstown, Ohio. Elsa Mora has lectured at The Art Institute of Chicago, The Art Institute of Boston, and San Francisco University among others. In 2000 she won the UNESCO-ASHBERG scholarship with a two-month residency in Mexico city where she produced the body of work entitled “Exercises in Silence”.