Selva Aparicio | What Remains
Gallery Wendi Norris
436 Jackson Street, San Francisco
Opening Reception | Friday, NOVEMBER 14, 5 – 7 pm
Artist talk with alison gass | Friday, NOVEMBER 14, 5:30 pm
Gallery Wendi Norris is proud to present three works by interdisciplinary artist Selva Aparicio (b. 1987, Barcelona). Known for her poignant and unexpected transfiguration of organic, often delicate and overlooked materials, Aparicio creates works that serve as profound meditations on memory, grief, resistance, and renewal. Exploring the boundaries between mourning and intimacy, materiality and decay, her debut exhibition at Gallery Wendi Norris will feature spatial interventions that embody the rigor, laboriousness, and painstaking precision of her physical process, as well as the quiet, emotional power at the heart of her deeply personal practice.
“I see these works together as forming an architecture of both mourning and resistance,” says Aparicio. “I work with what is fragile and neglected because fragility is honest. These materials—discarded cemetery flowers, cicada wings, human hair, a rug—are witnesses. They carry stories within themselves and remind us that beauty cannot be possessed, only respected.”
Spanning the gallery’s arched window will be Aparicio’s newest work, Leaves of Three, Let Me Be (2025), a reimagining of Frank Lloyd Wright’s striking Tree of Life stained-glass design. Embedding dried flowers collected from cemeteries between plexiglass and meticulously pieced into a stained-glass armature, Aparicio both honors and disrupts the tradition of sacred windows. By merging delicate materials within a framework of endurance, set aglow with the ephemerality of natural light, this work aims to sanctify that which is discarded, forgotten, and left on the margins.
Velo de Luto (2020)—“mourning veil” in Spanish—is a wall-mounted installation composed of the wings of 17-year cicadas sewn with the hair of three generations of women in Aparicio’s family. Subverting the garment’s historical association as a marker of women’s submission and blind faith within patriarchal structures, this piece harnesses the cicada’s long cycle of dormancy and brief, yet dramatic, eruption into life as a symbol of transformation, rebirth, and continuity. Weaving remnants of her female ancestors into this work, Aparicio reclaims the traditional implications of the mourning veil.
Aparicio has installed a large-scale “rug” carved directly into wood flooring. Through its elaborately crafted details, from tassels strewn in different directions to its ornate patterning, this piece, Childhood Memories (2024), initially gives the viewer the appearance of textile fabric. By producing through the act of physical scarring and rendering the rug immobile—fixed in place, quietly bearing witness, exposing rather than concealing—this work insists on beauty’s ability to flourish even in the midst of trauma.
ABOUT SELVA APARICIO
Working across sculpture and installation, Selva Aparicio (b. 1987, Barcelona; based in New York) examines the boundaries between mourning and materiality, intimacy and decay. Her practice transforms overlooked materials—ranging from cemetery flowers and cicada wings to human hair and cadavers—into works that hold space for grief, memory, and rebirth. With a unique sensitivity to the ephemeral, Aparicio explores the body as both a site of loss and transformation, reimagining cycles of life and death through fragile, time-based materials.
Aparicio’s work has been shown internationally at institutions including the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; DePaul Art Museum, Chicago; The Museum of Art and Design, NY; The International Museum of Surgical Science, Chicago; Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, CT; Can Mario Museum, Palafrugell, Spain; Kyoto International Craft Center, Japan; Instituto Cervantes, New York, NY; and Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona, Spain, among others. She completed a permanent public commission, At Rest, for the Beaufort 2024 Triennial in Belgium, and has forthcoming solo exhibitions at the Frank Lloyd Wright Martin House (2026) and Pioneer Works (2027). She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the 2025 Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Visual Arts, the 2023 Burke Prize from the Museum of Arts and Design, the 2022 Artadia Award, and the 3Arts Award/HMS Fund.
Aparicio holds a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an MFA in Sculpture from Yale University. She studied sculpture at Escola Massana in Barcelona and is currently Assistant Professor of Sculpture at Alfred University in Alfred, NY.
