LOS ANGELES, CA.- Marc Selwyn Fine Art announces Unspoken Ritual, an exhibition of new paintings by Los Angeles–based artist Salomón Huerta, on view at the gallery's Camden Annex. Long recognized for his psychologically charged portraits and meditations on identity and domestic space, Huerta turns to still life in this latest body of work. Spare table-top elements—a piece of fruit, a glass of milk, a sandwich—share space with the quiet, insistent presence of a gun. In this intimate shift in genre, Huerta brings the personal and the political into subtle but potent dialogue.

Huerta first came to prominence in the 1990s with enigmatic, faceless portraits and stark depictions of Los Angeles houses, works that explored how identity, class, and environment shape perception. In Unspoken Ritual, the artist turns inward, drawing directly from his childhood in Ramona Gardens, one of East Los Angeles’ most violent housing projects. Each night, as a child, he was tasked with bringing his father a simple snack and placing it beside the .38-caliber revolver that never left the bedside table. This pairing of nourishment and weaponry, care and vigilance, tenderness and threat, forms the emotional and conceptual core of these paintings.

“For me, this series symbolizes a simple way of life in the midst of a violent, hyper-reality,” Huerta notes. While rooted in autobiographical memory, these works extend the artist’s long-standing engagement with perception, stillness, and psychological nuance. Huerta cites Giorgio Morandi as a key touchstone, particularly the Italian painter’s commitment to seriality and the expressive potential of humble objects. "As I continued this series of still lifes," Huerta reflects, "the relationship between the food and the gun became as important as the story of those moments with my dad. I became interested in the visual poetry and the interplay of the objects."

In Unspoken Ritual, Huerta transforms a private childhood gesture into a concentrated visual vocabulary—one that holds fragility and menace in suspended balance, offering a meditation on family, memory, survival, and the quiet theatrics of everyday life lived in the shadow of danger.

Born in Tijuana, Mexico, in 1965, Salomón Huerta earned his BFA from Art Center College of Design in 1991 and his MFA from UCLA in 1998. His work has recently been the subject of solo exhibitions at Harper’s in New York and East Hampton (2022–2024), Louise Alexander Gallery in Porto Cervo, Italy (2019, 2021), California Lutheran University in Thousand Oaks, CA (2020), Gallery Vacancy/ltd los angeles, Shanghai (2019), and Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, Mexico City (2018); among others. Over the course of his career, Huerta has participated in major group exhibitions including Home—So Different, So Appealing at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2017); Transactions: Contemporary Latin American and Latino Art at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (2006); Retratos, El Museo del Barrio, New York, San Antonio Museum, San Antonio, and National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC (2005-6); and the Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2000). His work is held in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; the Fisher Museum of Art, University of Southern California, Los Angeles; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among others. Huerta lives and works in Los Angeles.