Agora Gallery is pleased to announce Woven Stories, a group exhibition of paintings and sculptures that express powerful collective and personal narratives, through the intersection of shapes, colors, and media.

The curatorial selections highlight a variety of ways the artists approach geometry, palette, and form in compositions that range from conceptual abstraction, color fields, impressionistic landscapes all the way to traditional oil painting figuration. Many approach the theme through the use of patterns, mostly referenced from nature–be it the Finnish tundra, the Indian jungle, or the French Riviera–which inform the chromatic choice with subdued hints of peaches and purples, bright accents of yellow and orange, or splashes of oceanic turquoise and emerald green. The motifs and materials often betray a strong cultural undercurrent in their evocation of Asian textiles, Islamic calligraphy, Mexican pueblos, or Southern marine life.

At times, compositional arrangements betray the artist’s sensitivity, unleashing common tales of suffering and resilience. Zoomorphic and anthropomorphic figures in bronze stand as testimonies of the plight of humankind–telling representations of human psychology and mental afflictions. Shrunk in scale–with missing limbs or half-erased faces–they are trapped in cages, stabbed by screws and metal rods, tied with rope, wounded in the gut. Pushing the confines of realistic depiction, the form here becomes a channel for universal expression and collective catharsis.