Clare Rojas lives and works in the San Francisco Bay area, where she was a key figure in the Mission School in the 1990s. This art movement took visual inspiration from everyday forms of culture, like graffiti, comics and cartoons, and folk arts like sign painting and quilt making. Since that era, Rojas has continued to make paintings that draw on the simplified forms of these sources while exploring new and personal meanings.

While her previous images often included strong women, Horses Two comes from a period in which the artist focused instead on abstraction. To her, it seemed like only male artists were permitted to paint in an abstract way. “Going abstract was just as political if not more so than anything else I've done,” she has claimed. Still, in Horses Two, perhaps the curves refer to the outline of the horses in the title, making reference to the importance of the horse in the artist’s Peruvian heritage and culture.