Hard Candy

The Ian Ross Gallery is pleased to bring you our first two person show for 2014. “Hard Candy” is a pairing of two local talents, John Waguespack and Katja Tapia. Working in vastly different styles and techniques, these two friends share the ability to captivate our senses with bold color palettes and a variety of subject matter from abstraction, to portraiture, to pop art. As a gallery committed to showing the work of local talents, we are very excited to be showing prolific San Francisco artist John Waguespack and introduce rising star Katja Tapia, both new to the Ian Ross Gallery.

John Waguespack is a contemporary artist whose technique can be obsessive, experimental, and passionate. He paints with power, bold color, and reveals a sense of deep introspection into his subject matter. His work is a complex filter for the daily barrage of information we receive through media. The work he creates hits you right in the chest, as if the multitude of hours layered into the vast color spectrums are his way to speaking to us through his personal space and time.

Katja Tapia’s abstractions come to us through a different mode of creation, and satisfy our gaze with peaceful whimsy. The colors dance together through a delicate fog and allude to some transformative time or place, a lucid moment captured on the canvas. Her work is reminiscent of the supple brushstrokes in impressionist paintings, as if a detail in the physical properties in the paint itself have been magnified to expose the play between the colors, somewhere between liquid and solid.

VIP Opening is February 7th from 7-10pm. If you’d like to attend please rsvp at info@ianrossgallery.com