Tonia Calderon in her
Los Angeles studio.
Photo: TONIA CALDERON, COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND VIELMETTER LOS ANGELES
Artist to Watch: Tonia Calderon Creates Striking Large-Scale Paintings Inspired by Poetry
The Los Angeles talent employs an unusual mix of mediums, fusing flower pigment, resin, acrylic, grout, sand, and fuel
Artist Tonia Calderon begins each painting not by making a sketch or a study but by writing poetry. “I want to form the work based on my poem,” says the Los Angeles talent. “With abstraction, there is sometimes a missing intentionality of the meaning behind the work because so often the title comes after the work is already made.”
Her process yields life-size, synesthetic compositions that echo contemporary art voices such as Lucy Bull and Tomm El-Saieh. Calderon employs an unusual mix of mediums, fusing flower pigment, resin, acrylic, grout, sand, and fuel. “When I started working with resin, I wanted something that would interrupt the curing process,” she says. “I started playing around with different chemicals to see how the resin would interact.”
Tonia Calderon in her Los Angeles studio with works And They’ll Tell Us We’re Running. As if We’re the Ones Losing Time (2023) (right) and They Seem to Think We Care What We Lose. As if We Haven’t Already Lost It All (2024). Photo: TONIA CALDERON, COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND VIELMETTER LOS ANGELES
May marks the artist’s first solo show at Vielmetter Los Angeles, which will be an exciting evolution of her exuberant debut at the gallery’s Art Basel Miami Beach booth in December. Titled “Unlearning,” her new body of work is “based on my own process and what I believe is a shared realization that our biggest lessons are moments of unlearning rather than learning something new,” she explains.
Of Mexican, Dutch, Chinese, and Indonesian descent, Calderon grew up in San Jose, California, and describes moving through a “roller coaster of classes,” from the affluence of her early childhood to homelessness and “everywhere in between.” In college, she focused her practice on becoming a visual artist with the written word as a constant influence. Her most celebrated series to date, “Black and Gold,” made up of geometric paintings embedded with music lyrics, is displayed on the walls of record labels like Epic and Def Jam. “Music has been a huge part of my life,” she says. “When I started to paint, I knew I wanted to put something I love into my work, and I can’t sing or play an instrument.”
Speaking while the city was still in the throes of the devastating fires, Calderon wrangles with the idea of preparing for an exhibition. “As artists, we all hope that there will be positive reflection,” she says, “and that we will create some hope to embrace the transformation that we’re all going through.”
A version of this article first appeared in print in our 2025 Spring Issue in the section “Artists to Watch.” Subscribe to the magazine.
Cover: Tonia Calderon in her
Los Angeles studio.
Photo: TONIA CALDERON, COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND VIELMETTER LOS ANGELES
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