Layers of mark making on the surfaces of his work evoke transgenerational histories and memories.Ītlanta-based artist and scholar Fahamu Pecou (born 1975) pushes the boundaries of fine art and popular culture through his blending of performance and traditional visual media. Parlá’s large-scale abstract paintings evoke impressions of the landscape as well as decaying walls along city streets, suggesting both an urban density and density in nature that evolve over time through an accumulative process. Parlá wrote of these early works, “My thought and impulse behind the gesture was as primitive as that of cavemen marking and drawing in their dwellings to assert their existence in a place and time.” Parlá made his first paintings on city walls while growing up in Miami, often under the cover of darkness. Drawing upon New York City and many other locations for inspiration, he responds to the chaos and rush of the metropolis as a painter. Lam combined these ideas with an exploration of Cuban subject matter to create a hybrid artistic style that was distinctly his own.īrooklyn-based artist José Parlá (born 1973) is a documentarian of urban life. The works in this exhibition reveal the imprint on Lam’s style of cubism, surrealism, magical realism, and other key artistic and philosophical movements of the twentieth century. He witnessed important historical events – the Spanish Civil War, the Nazi invasion of France, and the Cold War – and befriended key intellectuals and artists of the day. His multiracial ancestry found expression in his art as he engaged with the political, literary, and artistic circles that defined his century. Lam, like his native Cuba, was a product of many cultures. Wifredo Lam (1902-1982) was a global figure whose work cut across stylistic and philosophical boundaries between and among established artistic movements of the 20th century. His work is informed by a cross-cultural fusion of influences such as Afro-Cuban symbolism and Negritude, a movement that rejected the French colonial framing of African identity. The exhibition begins with the academic work made while studying painting in Madrid, and includes the fantastical mid-century canvases that incorporate figures from the syncretic religion Santéria. Born in Cuba to a Chinese father and mother of African and Spanish descent, Lam gave expression to his multiracial and cultural ancestry through a signature hybrid style of painting that blended Surrealism, magical realism, modernism, and postmodernism. Imagining New Worlds traces the lengthy career of Wifredo Lam (1902-1982), perhaps best remembered as a member of the Surrealist group in the 1940s. San Lazaro y Genios, La Habana, Cuba 2012ġ6th Street and Lenox Avenue, Miami Beach, Florida 1992įlitcroft Street, Soho, London, United Kingdom 2007Ĭalle Sol y Calle del Cristo, San Juan, Puerto Rico 2003 West Liberty Street and Whitaker Street, Savannah, Georgia 1991 242nd Street, Bronx, New York 1998Īsmalı Mescit Mh. Ghetto, Fontainebleau Boulevard and 92nd Avenue, Miami, Florida 1986 106th Street and Park Avenue, Spanish Harlem, New York 2003 These works act as palimpsests, surfaces bearing layers of marks, on which ensuing generations might imagine their own manifestos and declarations of selfhood. As do segments of the Berlin wall, Parlá’s sculptures bear witness to waves of history that seem to be inscribed on their surfaces, told in an expressive and poetic language of the street. Wood, acrylic, enamel, plaster, paper, gel medium and gessoĬourtesy of the Artist and Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery, New York Segmented Realities is a group of ten sculptural paintings by José Parlá that suggest cultural fragments salvaged from urban sites that have experienced social and cultural upheaval and transformation.
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