Alvin Gill-Tapia

After a peripatetic start to his career, Alvin Gill-Tapia returned to his native New Mexico, where he focuses on the architecture of the American Southwest in brightly colored paintings, enhanced with gold and silver leaf. He has also produced drawing, photography, ceramics, and weaving, which brought him to Europe early in his career. He then relocated to New York, where he studied and worked for a decade before feeling the tug of home. From there he celebrates in his compositions the magnificent quality of its desert light and colors, and their play on the spare geometrical volumes of its buildings. As Gill-Tapia describes it, “These buildings…exert a tremendous influence and power over the communities which survive here. I try to reflect that power in the monumentality of my compositions, and the force and brilliance of my use of color.”