JESSICA ALAZRAKI
The Shape of Home
May 9 - June 21, 2025

McBride / Dillman is thrilled to present Jessica Alazraki: The Shape of Home as the inaugural exhibition in our new gallery at 195 Henry Street in Manhattan opening May 9 and running through June 21, 2025. The Shape of Home is both a title and a statement of purpose - it is a deliberate act of positioning, an opening gesture that chooses vulnerability over spectacle, community over trend, and personal storytelling over grandstanding. The exhibition explores the meaning of home when carried across borders, when it is inherited through memory, reimagined by migration, and held together with thread and community.

At a moment when immigrant narratives are being systematically erased, politicized, or weaponized, The Shape of Home opens with an act of resistance that refuses spectacle, embraces intimacy, and asserts that everyday life holds stories worth telling. Born and raised in Mexico City, New York-based painter Jessica Alazraki offers us a depiction of familial love and cultural continuity, all under threat in the current American climate.

Alazraki’s paintings present interior worlds. Kitchens, bedrooms, table settings, scenes we know intimately, echoing the closeness of New York City’s cramped architecture. Her use of bold color and flattened perspective brings a graphic immediacy to these compositions, while her ornate patterns and thick textures of oil paints evokes the density of lived space. Her use of bold color, flattened perspective and tridimensional elements brings a graphic proximity to these compositions, but it’s the expressions of her subjects that hooks the viewer. The faces — some radiant, others visibly troubled — bear the emotional complexity of those who juggle with complex reality. Their gazes are not staged for us.

The artist herself stands within this frame. As a Mexican-American artist and mother, her paintings do not observe from a distance. They come from within. This is not documentary work. It is a personal visual archive, offered to a public that is too often asked to look away. By embracing an intentionally unpolished aesthetic, Alazraki resists academic refinement in favor of emotional clarity. Her figures are anonymous and reflect a visual language grounded not in formalism but in memory and aesthetic codes of everyday life.

Since 2016, ​Jessica Alazraki's work has garnered significant recognition and was awarded the Emerging Artist Prize from Jackson’s Painting Prize in 2021 and selected for New York City’s Percent for Art Program in 2022. She won the MvVO Ad Art Show at the Oculus and was a finalist for the Alexander Rutsch Painting Award in 2023. Her work is held in major collections, including the Hort Family Collection, the Rubell Family Collection, and the Jorge Pérez Collection, affirming her growing relevance in contemporary figurative painting. These honors, along with her participation in notable residencies like the Fountainhead Residency, underscore her position in contemporary art discourse. Jessica Alazraki's vivid portrayals of domestic life offer a poignant commentary resonating deeply in today's sociopolitical climate.