Quiara Torres: “Life’s Been Giving Me Lemons”
November 6, 2025 from 6 P.M. – 9 P. M.
RES is pleased to present “Life’s Been Giving Me Lemons,” a solo exhibition of new multimedia work by Dominican-American artist Quiara Torres. This is Torres’s first exhibition in Portugal, following her residency throughout the past several months. The title of the exhibition reflects Torres’s resilient spirt, having overcome turbulent times to seek out meditations and manifestations of abundance, wealth, luxury, divine protection, and healing. Torres will exhibit works inspired by and produced in Portugal, including paintings, sculptures and works that repurpose everyday materials, including hand-dyed burlap.
Torres’s vibrant, labor-intensive works convey optimism, devotion and respect for her community, family and peers in New York, where she experienced turbulent but formative times. Torres has harnessed her intrepid resourcefulness to pay homage to her community through powerful artworks that celebrate the complexity of her experience across cultures and socioeconomic status. Her choice of materials directly reflects the resilience and adaptability that characterize her work and imbue her figures with tenderness, confidence and strength.
Guided by surrealist ideas and intuitive interpretations, her work reveals symbolism through examining the natural world. She transmutes herself through animal and female portraits while echoing divine feminine iconography and other forms of spiritual tribute. Central to the exhibition is The Leopardess, an embodiment of empowerment mirroring the intense labor that Torres pours into her own work.
Her portrayals of the feminine evidence the meticulous detail and care that goes into appearance, as outward presentation is particularly culturally significant for Dominican women.
On a more personal level, Torres’s portrayal of women recalls experiences with her mother, a cosmetologist and salon owner, who embodied luxury despite sometimes trying circumstances. Color is essential to Torres’s work and artistic identity. The color yellow has become a recurring theme in the past year and throughout the exhibition. In a synchronistic occurrence, Torres was greeted by a lemon tree each morning. These lemons recur throughout the exhibition, a reflection on her time in Portugal.
Torres calls back to key images from her time in the Dominican Republic. As part of her installation throughout the gallery, Torres employs clotheslines, a significant memory of her time in the Dominican Republic, where clothes are placed out to dry on all kinds of surfaces, showing the ingenuity of the space. Painted and dyed works on burlap hang from the clotheslines for a more immediate experience. With the burlap sourced from across the community, Torres elevates and transforms traditional signifiers of poverty (peeling paint, chipped surfaces) into artworks that provoke confrontation with material wealth and the wealth of community. Elsewhere throughout the exhibition, Torres has included paintings of goats’ feet, a signifier of good luck and protection. For Torres, the goat embodies resilience and determination, the key characteristics that define Torres’s work.
In conjunction with her work as an artist, Torres founded The Buena Suerte Arts Club, a residency open to all artists, but with an initial focus on native Haitian and Dominican artists. Buena suerte means “good luck,” a feeling that Torres has embraced, in all its dimensions, even if bittersweet at times. She is also a professional singer and has a band, comprised of all Dominican musicians. Torres performs as “Qi,” that stands for the circulating life force whose existence and properties are the basis of much Chinese philosophy and medicine.
Torres lives and works in New York and the Dominican Republic. She has exhibited extensively in New York and the Dominican Republic and has been featured in numerous publications. Her work is featured in important private collections.