Sergio Suárez | Voids and thresholds

May 9 – June 7, 2025

Sargent's Daughters is pleased to present Voids and thresholds, the New York solo debut of Mexican-born, Atlanta-based artist Sergio Suárez. In a practice that encompasses woodblock carvings and prints, paintings, drawings, and sculptures, Suárez creates resonant allegories of metaphysical forces. Drawing equally upon Mesoamerican cosmologies and contemporary astrophysics, his work reframes concepts of temporality, translation, and syncretism.

Suárez’s practice is grounded in the tradition of wood-block printmaking, one of the most ancient techniques for reproducing an image. Often working on a monumental scale, Suárez carves directly into the wood panel, producing scenes that balance dense mark-making with unbounded forms. His compositions draw from diverse sources, including Precolombian mythologies, Catholic altarpieces, and modern images of deep space. 

After carving a panel, Suarez creates a print on muslin and the black-and-white image serves as the substrate for his vibrant paintings. Using oil, charcoal, aerosol, and chalk pastel, Suárez adds layers of color and resonance to his work, conjuring bodies that seem to glow from within. Woven together into enigmatic tableaux, Suárez’s figures enact rituals of creation and destruction, emerging from pools of water, dipping their fingers into divine fire, and offering orbs that seem to contain other universes within themselves. The exhibition’s title, Voids and thresholds, evokes the spaces these fragmented bodies inhabit – the limitless complexity and potential of the cosmic void and the liminal spaces that connect them to the physical world.

The wood carving and paintings exist in dialogue with Suárez’s talismanic sculptures. Cast aluminum, textile, ceramics, and stone both operate as extensions of the forms in the paintings and as speculative archeologies of the scenes depicted. For the artist, the constellations of materials and symbols in his work evoke the birth of language and the cosmos itself.

Sergio Suárez (b.1995, Mexico City, Mexico) is a Mexican-born, Atlanta-based visual artist and printmaker. He graduated from the Ernest G. Welch School of Art and Design in 2021 with a BFA in Drawing, Painting and Printmaking. 

His work has been shown across the United States and internationally, including The Museum of Contemporary Art (Atlanta, GA), Patel Brown (Montreal, Canada), Pale Fire Projects (Vancouver, Canada), KDR Gallery (Miami, FL), Casa Wabi Sabino (Mexico City, Mexico), Whitespace Gallery (Atlanta, GA), the Consulate General of Mexico (Atlanta, GA), the Atlanta Contemporary (Atlanta, GA), Woolwich Contemporary Print Fair (London, UK), the Haugesund International Relief Festival (Haugesund, Norway), OPED Space (Tokyo, Japan) and the Ionian Arts Center (Kefallinia, Greece); where he was an artist in residency in 2017 and 2018. Suárez has also been an artist-in-residence at MASS MoCA (North Adams, MA), Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture (Madison, ME), Penland Residency (Penland, NC), amongst others. In 2024, Suárez was an Artist-in-Residence at Bemis Center Residency (Omaha, NE) and at Bed-Stuy Art Residency (Brooklyn, NY) in 2025. His work has been reviewed by the Financial Times, Artillery, Burnaway, and has been featured in the #166 Issue of New American Paintings. His work is included in the public collection of the Zuckerman Museum (Kennesaw, GA). He lives and works in Atlanta, GA.