NYAB Event - Rafael Ferrer "Calor"

Rafael Ferrer "Calor"

Adam Baumgold Gallery (60 E 66th St.)

This event has ended.

Adam Baumgold Gallery presents Calor, an exhibition of works by Rafael Ferrer. The exhibition will feature paintings, drawings, works on paper, and sculpture from the last four decades based on theme of Calor (Heat). Tropical imagery of maps, islands, local characters, and palm trees references the artist's life in the Dominican Republic and his native Puerto Rico, and his vivid memories of these places.

Included in the exhibition is the large painting Dulzura, 1993 of a local woman balancing a basket of fruit on her head, with sea and sky in the background. This scene evokes the light and heat of the islands. In her review of Rafael Ferrer's 2010 retrospective Retro/Active at El Museo del Barrio, Roberta Smith said of the paintings from this period:

By the late 1980s Mr. Ferrer was making what could be his strongest works: visually and emotionally fraught paintings depicting radiant, shadow-pocked scenes of makeshift tropical dwellings and their inhabitants. These update modernism's calculated faux-primitivism with a vaguely photographic angularity. Image and paint collude uncannily, and the play of light and dark can be almost hallucinatory. Every form has a double life and nature intrudes from all sides.

Also in the exhibition is a large series of densely colored oil stick on paper works such as La Gallina, 1991 and Sombrero de Palma, 1991, which evoke the lifestyle of the people and the lush environment, yet hint at the turmoil of Caribbean life.

Throughout his career, Ferrer has synthesized figuration and abstraction. In large, colorful, gridded map works from the 1970s such as El Golfo, and 1976 La Luna y La Palma, 1979, the artist "combines the rational with the emotional, the linear with the coloristic, and Florentine restraint with Venetian sensuality."2 In the sculpture Lam, 1996, Ferrer merges landscape and figure by arranging three gourds on a steel armature to suggest the torso of Wilfredo Lam, an artist Ferrer befriended in the 1950s.

Rafael Ferrer was born in Santurce, Puerto Rico in 1933. He has exhibited extensively, and was included in the groundbreaking Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1969. Ferrer has participated in two Whitney Biennials, a solo installation at the Whitney in 1971, and in 1974 was among the first artists to do a "Projects" installation at the Museum of Modern Art. Retro/Active, a retrospective of his work, was held at El Museo del Barrio in 2010. In 2011 and 2012 Ferrer had survey exhibitions at Guild Hall, East Hampton, New York and at the Lancaster Museum of Art in Pennsylvania. This year the artist's work will be included in Re-Making When Attitudes Become Form, curated by Germano Celant in Venice, Italy.

[Image: Rafael Ferrer "La Gallina" (1991) oil stick on paper, 30 x 22 in.]

Media

• Painting
• Drawing
• Other
• Sculpture

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