Billis Williams Gallery is pleased to present Ana Medina: Grand Gestures, the gallery’s first solo exhibition of paintings by the Los Angeles-based painter. The exhibition features Medina’s most recent series of representational oil paintings and continues through November 11th.
Ana Medina’s paintings are an homage to the contemporary moment. In the current era of bottomless digital photo albums and lives lived publicly on social media, a new generation has been made to feel that they have to make every moment iconic – that their life needs to be bigger, better, and more beautiful than everyone else’s and shared online for all to see.
Medina’s paintings are the antidote – they are genre scenes depicting the world around the artist – paintings of her family and her friends as they go about their daily lives. These paintings are about capturing the joy of the most mundane moments and memorializing it in oil. Based on snapshots she takes, the paintings capture a split second that might otherwise disappear into the depths of our phone photo albums. The time consuming process of painting allows Medina to spend time recreating, and in a sense prolonging, the moments she chooses in stark contrast to how quickly we consume and discard digital memories today.
Medina’s newest paintings continue to interpret interconnection, but now as seen through the lens of coming in and out of the pandemic. The scale of life shifted and our focus was drawn inwards as our worlds became smaller and more precarious. The paintings focus on the intimate physical moments, and in so doing, illuminate the profound wonder of shared experience. Through her work, Medina reminds the viewer that every simple moment shared with each other is already perfection – no filter required.
Ana Medina (b. Fort Lauderdale, FL) received her BFA in Painting from Florida State University in 2008 and her MFA (with Distinction) in Painting from the University of New Mexico in 2012. Her paintings have been published in American Art Collector magazine, BOOOOOOOM, Archive 00 magazine, SELFISH magazine, and Dialogist: Quarterly Poetry and Art and have appeared in exhibitions throughout the United States. Medina’s paintings are in the collection of Great Smoky Mountain National Park and the collection of the University of New Mexico as well as numerous private collections. She currently lives and works in Los Angeles.
