Join KNOTORYUS At Clare Rojas ‘The Inexhaustible Middle’ At Alice Gallery (15/09-28/10/2016)

Opening a completely new museum would leave anyone knackered – if you haven’t visited the MIMA in Brussels yet, you definitely need to be speaking to your manager because what are you paying them for if not to let you know what’s truly good? – but gallerists Alice Van Den Abeele and partner Raphaël Cruyt tirelessly keep bringing beauty this way. Clare Rojas is the next artist to exhibit at ALICE Gallery in September and we’re going to need you to set a reminder.

Based in San Francisco, this will be Rojas’s first time showing at ALICE and the expo dubbed ‘The Inexhaustible Middle’ will feature all-new work. Her husband, the seminal painter and graffiti artist Barry McGee, has previously shown at the gallery in collaboration with Huskmitnavn in 2010. Rojas most recently designed geometric prints for shoe brand Freda Salvador and has previously exhibited at Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and Vladimir Restoin Roitfeld Gallery.

Allow me to be season one Charlotte York for a moment. Rojas’s work is largely known as folk art-inspired and often plays with entrenched societal gender roles for women. Her art is considered to be a part of ‘Mission School’, a San Franciscan art movement of the 90s and 2000s, also called ‘New Folk’. Her most recent work has been purely abstract, often untitled and less figurative than before. Geometric images often float in white space, using the shapes and colours as a form of stripped down symbolism.

The exhibition at ALICE runs from September 15th until October 28th. At the opening vernissage, Rojas will also be performing under her folk and country alter ego Peggy Honeywell. If you were wondering, my favourite Peggy track is Hey Lady, because everyone knows I’m a weary country bird at heart.