EN VOZ ALTA (ALOUD)

 

 

February 27 – March 21, 2015

Opening Reception, Thursday February 26, 6-8pm


Curated by Rachel Weingeist

We are pleased to present En Voz Alta (Aloud), an exhibition of works by twelve Cuban-born artists: María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Alberto Casado, Duvier del Dago, Meira Marrero & José Toirac, Liudmila & Nelson, Yunier Hernandez, Joseph Michael Lopez, Armando Mariño, Douglas Pérez Castro, Reynerio Tamayo, Carlos Rodríguez Cárdenas, and Elio Rodríguez – seven living in Havana, four in the United States and one in Europe.

The steady erosion of the United States embargo against Cuba, since 2009, has given hope to many there and abroad that normalization between the two countries is possible. On the island, opportunity, or the perception of it, are more plentiful than ever. Many Cubans are celebrating the potential bounty, hoping that electronic connectivity and open trade are now or soon will be within reach.

The educational system in Cuba has produced prolific and undeniable talent whose artwork is now being lauded by art critics, curators and collectors as the best-kept secret in the art market today. The process of passing on a lineage under the Cuban system of student to artist to professor is as persistent and durable as Cuban culture itself.

En Voz Alta “gives sudden voice to an easy coupling of artists,” according to Rachel Weingeist, the curator, who wanted to respond to “the emotions that Cuban artists are expressing – generated by the recent political shifts.”

Everyone wants to know what is next in Cuba’s future. Perhaps artist duo Meira Marrero and José Toirac’s tarot card deck, bound in leather of 24 cards, titled Profile, will shed light. This work is charged with symbols inspired by the iconic interview that resulted in One Hundred Hours with Fidel, the infamous tell-all in the words of the Revolutionary himself, published in 2006.

In this exhibition, as art often manifests, humor and the realities of daily routine are intertwined. All of the artists in this show are influenced by current and recent political events: Douglas Perez’s painting,  December 17th in the White House, refers to President Obama’s announcing the restoration of a diplomatic relationship with Cuba, and we witness Michelle and Barack Obama dancing on a banquet table, dishes flying in celebration. Duvier del Dago, well known for his light and string drawings, positions a larger-than-life nude Cubana at a podium set in a futuristic public square, orating to a raucous and fictional crowd. María Magdalena Campos-Pons, revered for her sensual imagery, offers Unspeakable Sorrow, a ceremonial black-on-black portrait of despair, loss and abandonment, a howl, in which the flowering Amaryllis is the only trace of life or color.

Rachel Weingeist is a contemporary curator and cultural advisor who has curated over twenty-five Cuban exhibitions that range in theme and scale. Over the last five years, Weingeist built the largest private Cuban art collection to date and created the first contemporary Cuban video archive, which has traveled widely. She is a member of the Harvard Cuban Studies Advisory Board and actively participates internationally in cultural and political dialogue.

Image: Duvier del Dago, The Story Belongs to the One Telling It, 2014 Watercolor & Ink on Paper 28 x 39 inches

 

 

 

 

 

 

VOLTA/BASEL Video Showcase – Armando Marino

Armando Marino presented at VOLTA 9, Basel

The axis of Armando Mariño’s recent work flows from the ethical dilemma implied by aestheticizing or domesticating a violent event — from the moment it becomes “breaking news” and is then converted into art through painting. He appropriates images whose authorship and authority become less important and more “everyday”, to which the public has instance access to via the web or print media, and from these Mariño launches a new kind of neo-historicism.

 

 

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VOLTA NY 2013


Please join us for  the Solo presentation of Armando Marino at VOLTA NY

“Marino is a romantic painter—his nature has the seductive abundance often found in traditional romantic landscape painting, as Tree of Life, 2012 makes clear—but he is an ironical romanticist, one might say a disappointed romanticist, as The Revolutionary, 2013 strongly suggests”
Donald Kuspit. 

Armando Mariño is included in the current exhibition Fifteen Recent Acquisitions at Deutsche Bank Collection 60 Wall Street. He had two solo exhibitions in 2012 in New York City, Recent Paintings from the Year of the Protester  at The 8th Floor Gallery/ Rubin Foundation and  The Waste Land at 532 Gallery Thomas Jaeckel in Chelsea.
In 2011 Mariño was Artist in Residence at the Bronx Museum  and recipient of the Pollock-Krasner Grant.

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Armando Marino at Architecture OMI

 

 

 

 

 

 

ARCHITECTURE OMI PROJECTS SKYLINE ADRIFT

Cuban Art and Architecture at Architecture Omi

September 16, 2012 – May, 2013

Artists Reception: Sunday, September 16, 12 noon-3pm
* The artists will give a presentation on their work at 1:30 during the opening

Architecture Omi presents SKYLINE ADRIFT: Cuban Art and Architecture, a politically and aesthetic ground-breaking show of multi-disciplinary, site-specific installations by two Havana based architects and two internationally established Cuban artists. SKYLINE ADRIFT will be on view September 16, 2012 through May, 2013 at Omi International Arts Center in Ghent, New York. An artists reception will be open to the public on Sunday September 16th from 12 Noon to 3 PM.

SKYLINE ADRIFT is curated by Rachel Perera Weingeist, Advisor and Curator, The Shelley and Donald Rubin Private Collection and Peter Franck, Director, Architecture Omi, with Ricardo Porro, the seminal Cuban architect and educator who provided unparalleled access to the brightest young architectural talent in Havana.

SKYLINE ADRIFT presents large-scale architectonic installations by Cuban architects Yilena Lourdes Feitó Echarri and Yoandy Rizo Fiallo and internationally renowned Cuban visual artists Alexandre Arrechea and Armando Mariño Calzado. The two architects, who had never before left Cuba, were awarded a six-week residency at the Vermont Studio Center for creative development and production of their site-specific installations. They travelled to Omi early in the summer to survey the site for their installations, which will be transported and installed on the grounds of Architecture Omi in early September.

Artists Alexandre Arrechea and Armando Mariño Calzado are well known on the international arts scene. Mariño recently took up residence near Omi in Athens, New York. Arrechea splits his time between Madrid and Havana. They both participate in global art fairs and exhibit in elite museums and galleries around the world and will contribute sophisticated sculptural pieces to the exhibition.

SKYLINE ADRIFT reflects current Cuban creative sensibilities across a broad spectrum of sculpture, architecture and installation art. Although the artists and architects emerge from very different professional pressures, they share the centuries-old traditions in which Cuba’s visual arts are deeply rooted. In creating four site-specific works in the picturesque landscape of Omi International Art Center’s 300-acre campus in New York’s Hudson Valley they will confront the quintessential rural context of New England, far removed from the ecological, political and cultural praxis of Havana. According to Architecture Omi Director Peter Franck, “this exhibition will introduce the current state of architectonic discourse in Cuba to the world outside Havana.”

“We wanted to offer Cuban architects the same opportunity more commonly granted to painters, ballet dancers and musicians in their country.  This program is a great example of the power of international cultural exchange and we expect for it to have a ripple effect on Cuba’s architecture community upon their return” added Weingeist.

Reflecting on the project, Ricardo Porro remarked “in architecture, we always begin with the problem of function and add poetry to that function. For this project, the architects are being asked to respond poetically to the landscape without the restriction of function….I do believe that an architect should be a painter and a sculptor and this, in essence is what this show is asking these young architects to be.”

SKYLINE ADRIFT is made possible by the JM Kaplan Fund, The Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation, Elise Jaffe + Jeffrey Brown, The Vermont Studio Center and Omi International Arts Center. Very special thanks to Francis Greenburger, Jon Gregg, Roxana González, María Elena Martín Zequeira, Alysa Nahmias, Mario’s Home Center (Valatie, NY), Ricardo Porro and Shelley and Donald Rubin.

Alexandre Arrechea sketch

Yoandy Rizo Fiallo

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The Waste Land

 

Armando Marino

October 11 – November 7


532 Gallery  Thomas Jaeckel is pleased to present the Solo exhibition in New York of Armando Mariño, entitled The Waste Land.

This solo show features new oil on canvas paintings and works on paper. The title of the show refers immediately to the T.S Eliot poem, but the paintings that Marino shows are far from an illustration of it. In these paintings the artist recognizes the poem as a background to his work. “It helped me put together all the paintings,” he said. “The style of the poem overall is marked by hundreds of allusions and quotations from other texts, like my paintings.”

If the subject of his previous show was the mass protests, revolution, and tumult of last year, the artist is now more focused on the contradiction and friction between spirituality and the chaotic world we live in. The imagery in his paintings come from different sources: two Tibetan monks, a holy man from India, and a Western landscape in autumn are some of the images that serve as material for the new show.
Marino employs photos taken from magazines, web sites or books, which he crops, edits and transforms to create a new narrative or history that matches his interests. The result are large-scale paintings, colorful and intense, classic and obscure; “highbrow” and “low-brow” layered ad infintum, so that the viewer has to look closely to discover it all.
Marino is one of the most prominent Cuban artists from his generation. He has exhibited extensively in museums and galleries in Europe and USA.

In 2010 Marino moved to New York from Madrid for one year as part of the ISCP Brooklyn. That year he also participated in the exhibition Queloides: Race and Racism in Cuban Contemporary Art at the Mattress Factory Museum Pittsburgh.
Between 2010 and 2012, his work drew the attention of critics and curators in the U.S., prompting invitations to participate in exhibitions, such as El Museo del Barrio’s Biennial (S) Files (2011) and Building Identities: Contemporary Cuban Art from the Shelley and Donald Rubin Private Collection, presented in the Cleveland Clinic’s Art Program of the Arts & Medicine Institute. In addition to an Artist’s Studio residency at the Bronx Museum of the Arts (2011-12), Marino was awarded a The Pollock Krasner Grant that year.
Marino’s work is held by many private and public collections, such as The Donald and Shelley Rubin Collection, the Deutsche Bank Collection U.S., The Berardo Collection Portugal, The Farber Collection U.S., The Netherland Bank Holland, the National Museum of Fine Art Cuba, and The Coca Cola Foundation Spain, among others. Marino’s first solo show in New York, Recent Paintings From the Year of the Protester, took place in the nonprofit space The 8 Floor, with the support of the Rubin Foundation and The Bronx Museum of the Arts. This show prompted invitations to participate in Project V at the Hudson Valley Contemporary Art Center in Peekskill in 2012/2013, and Skyline Adrift Cuban Art and Architecture at Art Omi in Ghent, New York (September 2012-spring 2013).
The Waste Land is Marino’s first solo gallery show in New York City.