Harper’s is pleased to announce Stillness, Los Angeles-based artist Salomón Huerta’s fourth solo exhibition with the gallery. The presentation features new oil paintings by Huerta and opens Thursday, May 15, 6–8pm, at Harper’s Chelsea 512 with a reception attended by the artist.
Throughout his career, Huerta has developed a keen awareness of the quiet drama of domestic space. The artist frequently renders everyday scenes with a heightened presence. His still life paintings of interior and exterior terrains reveal the theater that accents the banal, rendering everyday figures, objects, and interiors with enthralling palettes. Throughout Stillness, Huerta derives inspiration from the radiant colors that saturate haute couture magazines. In mood and tone, these new works draw viewers into enchanting worlds: the artist enlivens traditional vistas of suburbia, coloring the mundane with a whimsical hand.
In one Untitled (House) work, silence befalls a trio of lavender houses. Their pointed roofs reach toward a sprawling ochre sky that appears thick with heat. Triangular forms resembling trees slice vertically down the visual plane, partitioning the houses with further angularity. Below them, the ground is flush with a tender pink hue that softens the otherwise unyielding composition. In another, Huerta reproduces a similar arrangement of the provincial landscape, with three green homes placed in parallel uniformity like prototypes of a prospective township. Within these orderly scenes, time does not appear to pass: stately homes instead sit in fixed alignment amidst neat surroundings.
Alongside these subjects, Huerta also continues his investigation of swimming pools—a recurrent object of study across his work and the primary motif of his ongoing series, Pool Paintings. In one painting, Huerta portrays a green pool in cinematic stillness, staged in front of a dewy landscape laden with lush palm trees. Like the refracting water, these trees are composed of fluid marks—abstracted strokes of orange and yellow flicker like torches against a gray sky. Their reflections shimmer ghostlike in the emerald water below, warping with painterly distortion. Huerta’s brushwork blurs figuration with atmosphere here, transforming a seemingly mundane setting into something dreamlike and uncanny. The setting is both serene and charged with latent tension.
Together, these new paintings reveal Huerta’s enduring fascination with the poetics of space and surface. The artist approaches each terrain with a profound curiosity: through his brush, the pedestrian becomes otherworldly—each conventional habitat its own vessel for impassioned exploration of form and color. With a masterful balance of controlled mark-making and painterly expression, Huerta invites viewers to linger in these suspended moments throughout Stillness. In these transitory intersections, narrative falters and perception takes hold.
Salomón Huerta (b. 1965, Tijuana, Mexico) received a BFA from Art Center College of Design in 1991, and an MFA from UCLA in 1998. Most recently, his work has been the subject of solo presentations at Harper’s, New York and East Hampton (2024, 2023, and 2022); Louise Alexander Gallery, Porto Cervo, IT (2021 and 2019); California Lutheran University, Thousand Oaks, CA (2020); Gallery Vacancy/ltd los angeles, Shanghai (2019); Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, Mexico City (2018); There There Gallery, Los Angeles (2018); and Christopher Grimes Gallery, Santa Monica, CA (2014). Throughout his career, Huerta was included in notable group presentations including Home—So Different, So Appealing, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles (2017); Transactions: Contemporary Latin American and Latino Art, Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego (2006); Retratos, El Museo del Barrio, New York, San Antonio Museum, San Antonio, and National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC (2005-6); Lateral Thinking: Art of the 1990s, Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego (2002); Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2000); and LA Current, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (1999 and 1997). His work has been acquired by numerous institutions including Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Reviews of his work have appeared Artforum, Art in America, and BOMB, among other publications. Huerta lives and works in Los Angeles.