February 6, 2025 - March 28, 2025
Open: Thursdays & Fridays • 3P - 7P
Petit Amour invites viewers into the intimate and expressive world of Sonia Calderón. Through abstract compositions and evocative still life works, Calderón explores the interplay of light and shadow, longing and revelation, the seen and the deeply felt. Each piece is a quiet confession—a whisper of emotion, memory, and desire.
Lip Series by Sonia Calderon
Sonia Calderon’s Lip series began with the vivid impression that her mother’s lipstick collection made on her as a child.
A high-powered attorney who often represented women, Sonia’s mother’s lipsticks encompassed a range of hues, her favorite ones worn to a point, and the exotic, raw power of this off-limits collection of tubes fascinated the five-year-old Sonia, who was already beginning to explore paint.
As an adult and seasoned abstract painter, Sonia entered her fixation with lips—and the importance of women’s voices—as she grieved her mother’s premature death by addiction. The resulting “Lips” series is as varied as lipstick: some are blurred and diffuse, others echo like pop art, many are undeniably suggestive, and all are composed with Sonia’s heartfelt conviction to uncover each individual story—that of love, tragedy, loss, serenity, sensuality and sheer femininity—beneath the surface.
Sonia Calderon’s Lip series began with the vivid impression that her mother’s lipstick collection made on her as a child.
A high-powered attorney who often represented women, Sonia’s mother’s lipsticks encompassed a range of hues, her favorite ones worn to a point, and the exotic, raw power of this off-limits collection of tubes fascinated the five-year-old Sonia, who was already beginning to explore paint.
As an adult and seasoned abstract painter, Sonia entered her fixation with lips—and the importance of women’s voices—as she grieved her mother’s premature death by addiction. The resulting “Lips” series is as varied as lipstick: some are blurred and diffuse, others echo like pop art, many are undeniably suggestive, and all are composed with Sonia’s heartfelt conviction to uncover each individual story—that of love, tragedy, loss, serenity, sensuality and sheer femininity—beneath the surface.
Sonia Calderón has been expressing herself as an artist since she was a child. Raised in Berkeley, California and Minneapolis, Minnesota, Sonia’s professional career as an abstract painter explores the intense intersection of the seen and unseen. With a unique eye for juxtaposition, the abstraction in her work is guided by her intuitive pursuit of emotional undercurrents and personal experience. She has lived and painted in Berlin, Northern California, Los Angeles, and Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Sonia Calderón’s work retains an ethereal and diffuse aesthetic as the artist moves through new phases and obsessions. Under the heady influence of the living, breathing landscapes of New Mexico, Calderón’s collage-style abstract paintings have shifted from external planes to the internal, embracing the surreal interpretations of distance through time and space, and the inner and outer landscapes of the heart and mind. In her still life works, light and shadow play on the symbolism intuited through human suffering and exaltation, seduction and desire, grace and surrender. Her lips series captures intimately exposed ruminations; a song, a possibility, a secret kept or whispered. Drawn to profound extremes of light and dark, euphoria and surrender, the sensual and metaphysical, her influences include several abstract expressionist painters of the 20th century, as well as fashion and design, nature, and contemporary art photographers who capture the glamorous and the mundane moments of private life.
