Dalton Gata “The Devil Sees Beauty In A Pair Of Horns, Four Claws, And A Tail”

Chapter NY

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In collaboration with Galería Agustina Ferreyra. Chapter NY is pleased to announce The Devil Sees Beauty In A Pair Of Horns, Four Claws, And A Tail, Dalton Gata’s first exhibition in New York. The exhibition features a recent series of portraits, both paintings and drawings.

Dalton Gata’s practice merges popular culture with personal relationships to build a visual universe of peculiarly striking characters. His figurative language draws from Surrealism, Afro-Carribean culture, and his background as a fashion designer. Lovers, pets, friends, internet findings, music, fashion, drag, interior design, and fantastical creatures appear throughout his fictive realm. With an acute attention to detail Gata builds an atmosphere around his subjects, beckoning viewers to uncover his open-ended narratives.

For his current exhibition at Chapter, Gata explores the fantastical elements inherent in “ugliness” ascribed by culturally sanctified standards of beauty. Gata adapted the title of the exhibition from Voltaire’s definition of “Beautiful (The)” in his Philosophical Dictionary, originally published in 1924. Gata, like Voltaire, is fascinated by the subjectivity of beauty which cannot be defined according to a single standard.

In his newest series, Gata reflects upon the psychological and social effects related to our appearance. The artist lavishly adorns his fashionable characters with mainstream status symbols to accentuate their “undesirable” features. Human or otherwise, his glorified subjects appear empowered, elevated, and approaching mythical status. Gata aims to dissolve normative methods of classification, insisting on the beauty of diversity and the importance of acceptance. Together, his individual portraits provide an unparalleled vision of our society brimming with confident self-expression, concealed insecurities, and multifarious eccentricities.

Dalton Gata (b. 1977 in Santiago de Cuba, Cuba), graduated in 2005 from the Escuela de Diseño Altos del Chavón in Santo Domingo, DR with a BFA in Fashion Design. In 2019 he had a solo exhibition at Galería Agustina Ferreyra, Mexico City. He has exhibited widely in the Dominican Republic and the Caribbean including the 27th National Biennial of Visual Arts, Santo Domingo (2013), Ramos Mederos Gallery, Santo Domingo (2014), Lucy Garcia Gallery, Santo Domingo (2015, 2016, 2017), and the Spanish Cultural Center of Santo Domingo (2016), as well as Embajada Gallery, San Juan (2018). Gata lives and works in Coamo, Puerto Rico.