Maria A. Guzman Capron: Siluetas Simultáneas

Nazarian / Curcio is pleased to present Siluetas Simultáneas, Maria A. Guzmán Capron’s third solo exhibition with the gallery. On view from April 11 through May 16, 2026, the exhibition will open with a reception on Saturday, April 11 from 6–8 PM. This new series expands Guzmán Capron’s ongoing exploration of identity as a site of multiplicity, focusing on the interplay between abstracted and recognizable figures constructed from richly patterned textiles.

The exhibition is presented in dialogue with Penumbra, a concurrent solo presentation at the Sarasota Museum of Art (on view April 19 through September 27, 2026). While Penumbra embraces companionship through shadow-like doubles that accompany the self, Siluetas Simultáneas turns toward protection by examining how the body is shielded, held, and made visible through layers of form. The notion of simultáneas emerges here as a structuring principle, describing the capacity for a single figure to hold opposing modes of being at once. These configurations do not resolve into fixed identities but instead offer one articulation of how multiplicity can take form.

Born in Italy to Colombian and Peruvian parents and based in the United States, Guzmán Capron draws from personal and cultural histories of migration, in which clothing operates as a marker of memory, adaptation, and the construction of self. In her work, textile functions as both material and language, serving as an intimate register through which identity is shaped, negotiated, and performed.

For Siluetas Simultáneas, Guzmán Capron introduces a new formal structure in which abstracted figures function as anthropomorphic dressing screens. Historically, screens define and protect domestic space while suggesting the presence of a body behind them. Here, these forms wrap around and shield more legible figures, creating conditions in which concealment enables revelation. Partially veiled, the figures engage in moments of pleasure and rest, enabling states of guarded vulnerability while inviting the gaze of the viewers. Two large-scale suspended textiles in the central gallery extend this logic into the space, allowing viewers to experience their own moments of concealment and revealing, while echoing the forms within the works. 

This body of work also reflects an evolution in the artist’s process. In a departure from her earlier use of found and mass-produced fabrics, Guzmán Capron now produces each textile herself. Working from full-scale preparatory drawings, she dyes and hand-paints patterns that are then cut and assembled in a process akin to garment construction. Each textile is developed in direct relation to the form it will inhabit, so that color, pattern, and texture are integral to the construction of the figure itself.

Across Siluetas Simultáneas, figures merge and separate, their boundaries shifting between clarity and dissolution. Extending her ongoing consideration of the body as a site that holds multiple selves, Guzmán Capron mobilizes textile as both structure and skin, at once protective and permeable. In bringing abstraction and figuration, concealment and exposure into sustained relation, the works do not seek to stabilize identity, but to hold it open, articulating the self as plural, contingent, and continuously unfolding.

Maria A. Guzmán Capron received her MFA from California College of the Arts in 2015 and her BFA from the University of Houston in 2004. Select solo exhibitions include San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; UB Center for the Arts in Buffalo, NY; the Blaffer Art Museum, Houston, TX; Shulamit Nazarian, Los Angeles, CA; Texas State Galleries, San Marcos, TX and Guerrero Gallery, San Francisco, CA. Select group exhibitions include El Museo del Barrio, New York; Boston University, Boston, MA; Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco; Berkeley Art Center, Berkeley, CA; Shulamit Nazarian, Los Angeles, CA; The Mistake Room, Los Angeles; Public Gallery, London, UK; NIAD Art Center, Richmond, CA; CULT Aimee Friberg Exhibitions, San Francisco; Deli Gallery in New York; and Buffalo Institute for Contemporary Art, Buffalo, NY. Her works have been written about in Hyperallergic, Variable West, Bomb Magazine, and Art in America.

Capron’s work is in the collection of the de Young Museum, San Francisco, CA; the Jorge M. Pérez, Miami, FL; the Speed Art Museum, Louisville, KY; and the Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, NY. As a 2022 recipient of SFMOMA’s SECA Award, her exhibition Respira Hondo was presented at SFMOMA through May 2023.