Griselda Rosas: Veni, Vidi, Vici

Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is pleased to announce Griselda Rosas: Veni, Vidi, Vici, on view from January 10 through February 28, 2026. This is the artist’s second solo exhibition with the gallery and follows her inclusion in the 2025 California Biennial at the UC Irvine Langson Orange County Museum of Art. An opening reception will be held on Saturday, January 10, 2026, from 4:00 – 7:00 p.m.

Griselda Rosas’s exhibition, Veni, Vidi, Vici, presents multidisciplinary works that resist binaries, inviting viewers into layered allegories, histories, and personal experiences. Through collaborative drawings and use of a wide range of materials—faux ostrich skin, embroidered silhouettes, grain-sacks, domestic textiles, large-scale, charcoal works on paper—she highlights the tensions between play, intimacy, and the narratives we inherit. The exhibition’s title, “Veni, Vidi, Vici,” meaning “I came, I saw, I conquered,” adapts the historic Latin phrase to recall both its military origins and its contemporary use as a declaration of individual triumph, prompting a reflection on histories of domination and the enduring influence of victory-driven language in shaping culture and identity.

Themes of nurture, intergenerational exchange, and inherited memory emerge through Rosas’ collaborations with her young son, Fernando, incorporating his uninhibited freehand drawings into compositions that begin with the two selecting a shared subject and drawing it separately. Rosas enlarges and transforms these sketches into monumental, often monstrous, mixed media or charcoal renderings—a process that echoes the distortions and shifts in perspective that shape stories of war as they are retold across generations. As a single parent and cross-border commuter, she extends this inquiry by examining gendered expectations and the culture of warfare embedded in toys marketed along rigid gender lines, revealing how commercial design naturalizes militarized play and scripts early performances of masculinity. Her ongoing research, spanning precolonial toys to contemporary political tensions and liminal border spaces, underscores the persistent entanglement of conflict, storytelling, and the materials of childhood.

Rosas’ works reclaim the language of conquest through a distinctly intersectional feminist lens, foregrounding care, collaboration, and embodied knowledge as forms of resistance. Her embroidery becomes a mode of historic correction—repairing, revising, and subverting colonial visual language—while her textiles function as repositories of Indigenous knowledge often omitted from written archives.By drawing from maternal labor, intergenerational storytelling, and the material culture of play, Rosas challenges the social and geopolitical frameworks that naturalize domination. Veni, Vidi, Vici is thus transformed from a declaration of victory into an inquiry: who authors history, and how might those narratives be rethreaded toward repair?