NYAB Event - Jorge Tacla "Altered Remains"

Jorge Tacla "Altered Remains"

Cristin Tierney Gallery

This event has ended.

Cristin Tierney presents an exhibition of new paintings by Jorge Tacla entitled Altered Remains.

In his newest body of work Tacla engages the idea of social rupture, situating it at the crux of a new architecture that arises in the
wake of natural and man-made disasters. Tacla perceives the devastation that results from such events as an opportunity to
investigate structural systems that would otherwise remain unseen. In a painting such as Altered Remains 1, the composition is
derived from images of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti. Tacla’s deliberate evocation of such a horrific event, experienced by most of
us only through news reports and media outlets, forces us to consider our relationship to that catastrophe.

Influenced by the writings of the forensic anthropologist Roxana Ferllini and the Hungarian psychoanalyst Sándor Ferenczi, the
artist effectively translates the pictorial space of the canvas into a psychological one. To signify such unsettled worlds he uses an
obsessive pictorial language, repeating the same gesture in the same space many times until the visual register is analogous to the
trauma that prompts it.

Tacla is best known for large-scale pictures, neither abstract nor figurative, but always haunted by history. Spatially complex and
visually fantastic, Tacla’s paintings possess a morbid beauty and a conceptual elegance that sets them apart from the tradition of
modern abstraction. The critic and scholar, Donald Kuspit, has written that Tacla’s work “stretches the limits of objective
representation until it breaks down into subjective abstraction, allowing the expression of unconscious feelings that factual
representation tends to repress.”

Born in Santiago, Chile in 1958, Tacla studied at the Escuela de Bellas Artes, Universidad de Chile in Santiago, before moving to
New York in 1981. His most recent exhibitions include Sharjah Biennial 10 in Sharjah, UAE, Hidden Identity, González y
González, in Santiago, Chile, and the Dublin Contemporary 2011 in Dublin, Ireland. Tacla is a recipient of the John Simon
Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (1988) and a New York Foundation of the Arts Grant (1987, 1991) and he has
exhibited internationally since the early eighties. Other notable exhibitions have included Jorge Tacla: Papel at the Galería
Animal, Santiago, Chile in 2010 and The Man Who Fell to Earth at the 798 Biennale in Beijing, China in 2009. His most recent
catalogue, published in 2010 by Galería Animal, features an essay by Francesca Pietropaolo. Other recent publications include
Jorge Tacla: Pinturas/Paintings, which includes an essay by Donald Kuspit and Raul Zamudio Taylor, printed in 2008. His work
is included in many public collections, including the Drawing Center, New York, High Museum of Art, Atlanta, the Milwaukee
Art Museum, the Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City, and the Museo de la Memoria y Derechos Humanos, Santiago, Chile.