From Terra to Verde: The Work of Sharon Kopriva Exhibition

From Terra to Verde is a thirty year survey of works created between 1982 and 2012 by Houston artist, Sharon Kopriva. Born into a Catholic family in the Houston Heights in 1948, she received a Master of Fine Art in Painting from the University of Houston in 1981. In 1982, she traveled to Peru, where she encountered the open burial grounds and mummified bodies of the ancient pre-Columbian Nazca culture. It was a defining moment in her life and art. Over the next thirty years, Kopriva's work explores issues of faith and doubt, life and death, primitive culture, historic events and contemporary society. Working in an imagist style, she conveys her personal spiritual journey through sculptures, drawings, paintings and installations. Moving from the earth-tones of her early expressionistic landscapes and mummies to more recent magical realist depictions of forests-as-cathedrals, this exhibition reveals the breadth and unity of her career.