Department of Art & Design at Chicago State University Presents:

Maria Tomasula: Antinomy

The exhibition “Maria Tomasula: Antinomy” will be held at the President’s Gallery, Chicago State University in celebration of Hispanic Heritage Month. The Latino Resource Center encourages students, staff, and faculty to celebrate this artist!

President's Gallery | September 21 - October 27, 2023

Chicago State University

9501 S. King Drive, ADM 3^rd floor

Chicago, IL 60628

Mexican American artist Maria Tomasula produces sumptuous still life paintings that are super-realistic but disturbing, the foundation of which she attributes to Mexican Catholicism. The images she encountered at church, particularly martyred saints with idealized features bearing marks of horrific torture, are now translated into beautiful flowers and fruits strenuously tied by strings and driven by nails. Her symbolic still lifes embody both the sensuousness of the visual as well as the suffering implicated in most of the Catholic representations. The conjoined vitality and violence relay the themes of life and death. This exhibition shows the contradictory elements such as attractiveness and repulsiveness, growth and decline, dispersion and convergence, all harmoniously conjugated in her unusual arrangement and display of divergent still life objects.