Teresa Serrano: Echoing What is Known
Barbara Davis Gallery is pleased to announce "Echoing What Is Known", a solo exhibition opening at the gallery by renowned artist Teresa Serrano. The artist reception opens Friday, September 5th, 2025 from 6pm to 8:30pm on view through October 18th, 2025.
The exhibition at Barbara Davis Gallery is curated with works from Serrano’s recent retrospective exhibition at MARCO (Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey), held earlier this year. The journey from Monterrey to Houston marks a rare and intimate continuity—each piece carrying with it the energy of its last encounter.
Serrano initiated her career as an artist in New York City in the 1970s, and has since become one of the most important visual artists from Latin America. Echoing What Is Known gathers works spanning over forty years—early gestures from the 1990s alongside newly unearthed pieces completed in 2024. It is a gathering of echoes—those that linger from the past, and those that are just now beginning to take shape. Together, they form a resonant field of memory and defiance, where what has long been lived in silence begins to speak.
Serrano’s groundbreaking work echoes beside those of Ana Mendieta, Lygia Clark and Magdalena Abakanowicz, women who also turned to the body, to memory, to ritual, to redefine what art could hold. Her work stands in tandem with important figures from art history, where ideas manifest in the conceptual and symbolic, rather than rhetorical, in nature. They invite the transgression of minimalist purity, not only in material, but in spatial terms.
In Echoing What Is Known, the domestic becomes both site and subject. A chair is no longer a chair—it becomes witness, burden, confinement. A gesture becomes a ritual. A room becomes a threshold. Serrano’s work creates spaces in which viewers may linger and reflect. But more than anything, these works insist on presence—they mark the body, the voice, the story that will not disappear.
Serrano’s sculptures serve as ironic metaphors for the identification of the body with nature. The artist’s works on paper also take a poetic and symbolic approach to the expressive links between plants, flowers and the body, at times presenting a subtle social critique, while also seeking to restore in our collective imaginary the sense of joy and astonishment aroused by encounters with nature.
During the 90s, Serrano’s work exhibited in the prestigious Annina Nosei Gallery, NY. Her work has since been featured in The Whitney Museum, New York, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, Beijing 798 Biennial China and is in major public and private collections, including the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Museo de Arte Moderno (Mexico City); MARCO, Museo de Arte Contemporanio de Monterrey; Museo de the Daros Latinamerica Collection, MUAC, Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporanio, CDMX; and LACMA, Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
The title—Echoing What Is Known—offers a quiet summons. In Serrano’s work, what is known is often what has been buried, endured, or whispered: the weight of domestic care, the claustrophobia of obedience, the invisible architecture of patriarchy. Her art does not scream; it listens, remembers, and responds. Through drawing, sculpture, photography, video and installation, she weaves a language that is both deeply personal and universally felt.
