Tamara Gonzales: The center does not hold, it blooms

March 21 - April 30, 2026

The Pit is pleased to present “The center does not hold, it blooms” a new solo exhibition by Brooklyn-based artist Tamara Gonzales, her fourth solo exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition will be on view March 21 - April 30, 2026 with an opening reception on Sunday March 22 from 3-5pm. This new exhibition will include new mosaic wall works and sculptures by Gonzales, her first presentation since her debut of the mosaic wall works at Frieze Los Angeles in 2025.

Gonzales’s practice moves between abstraction and figuration, guided by color as a living force, and pattern as a carrier of memory. For Gonzales, painting functions as a devotional and intuitive act—a way of listening to what surfaces when ancestral knowledge, personal experience, and spiritual practice converge.

The works in this exhibition were developed during Gonzales’s recent residency in Limassol, Cyprus, where the artist created watercolors deeply influenced by the Mediterranean light reflecting on water at different times of day and the layered history of the land. A brief visit to Athens further informed the imagery: dolphins, fish motifs, waves, Greek architecture, and an overarching sense of antiquity permeate the compositions. The glass tile mosaics presented in the exhibition match closely to the original watercolors Gonzales made during her residency.

In the exhibition, the mosaic titled “Viriditas” depicting a growing lotus, is named after a term coined by medieval mystic Hildegard von Bingen. More than simply “greenness,” viriditas describes the vital force of life itself—spiritual vitality, creative fecundity, the divine energy flowing through all living matter. For Hildegard, when something is alive, ethical, or holy, it possesses viriditas; when corrupt or deadened, it has lost its greenness. A philosophy central to Gonzales’s practice, the concept honors becoming over being, process over purity, lushness over control.

Spiritual forms regularly permeate Gonzales’s compositions. In “Beneath the Waves,” a face-like form dissolves and reappears, aquatic in nature, reflecting waves and sea creatures. “Amber Lotus Helix” features a recurring motif in Gonzales’s practice – amoeba-like shapes resembling cells splitting, life duplicating from one into two – in this case specifically recalling aquatic ocelli.

Ultimately, Gonzales’s works function as both personal offerings and invitations to the viewer. They ask how we remember, how we honor lineage, and how visual language can hold both the visible and the unseen without resolving either. This dynamic is meant to be felt in the body, functioning as a sensory map that encourages reflection, intuition, and expanded ways of seeing.

For more information please email info@the-pit.la