Rosana Castrillo Díaz

PRESS RELEASE

Rosana Castrillo Díaz

14 January – 21 February 2020

Artist reception: Tuesday, 14 January, 5 to 7 pm

Anthony Meier Fine Arts is pleased to present a retrospective exhibition of graphite drawings by Rosana Castrillo Díaz – the artist’s fourth exhibition at the gallery. 

Dated 2002 to 2020, the forty-four drawings make up a key facet of the artist’s work over two decades. Assembled together for the first time, they represent a range of subjects, each showcasing Castrillo Díaz’s eye for light and line. Early works feature notecards, scraps of paper, folded newspapers and balled rubber bands. Drawings of dahlias confront the progress of time on living creatures; minute details mark the passage of the flowers’ lifespan. 

Recent drawings detail intersections of line in everyday objects: the central knot of a wound textile ball, a pair of paper crumples, a close-up braid of California sweetgrass. In each case, the artist’s commitment to detail and careful pairing of graphite with negative space illustrate her ability to create a photoreal image using only basic tools.

“In the dialogue and exchange of information I am having with the drawings as I work, the information I receive from them comes via sound and touch before sight. I am able to hear or feel a mistake, a scratch in the wrong place for example, before I see it.”

The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue with an essay by Janet Bishop. Anthony Meier Fine Arts is grateful to the lenders who have supported the artist’s career and loaned their work for this exhibition. 

Rosana Castrillo Díaz lives and works in San Francisco, CA. Castrillo Díaz received a Bachelor of Fine Art degree in 1993 from Facultad de Bellas Artes, Universidad Complutense in Madrid, Spain; a Bachelor of Fine Art degree in 1996 from Cleveland Institute of Art, Cleveland, OH; a Post-Baccalaureate degree in 1999 from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; and a Masters of Fine Art degree in 2003 from Mills College, Oakland, CA. Castrillo Díaz is the recipient of the 2005 Artadia Art Award, Artadia: The Fund for Art and Dialogue, New York, NY; the 2004 SECA Art Award, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; the 2003 Jay DeFeo Merit Award, Mills College, Oakland, CA, among others. 

Selected public collections include Mills College Art Museum, Oakland, CA; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; UCSF Mission Bay Campus, Community Center, San Francisco, CA (Permanent Installation); University of California, Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, CA; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY.