Grimanesa Amorós

Exploring Light and Essence: The Luminescence of Grimanesa Amorós

Grimanesa Amorós, a luminary within the artistic realm, has enraptured audiences with her profound and contemplative light installations. Drawing upon her formidable background in painting and her unyielding passion for materials, she has transcended the boundaries of her medium, fashioning immersive experiences that provoke introspection and challenge the perceptual confines of our world. This evocative exposition embarks on a profound odyssey into the labyrinthine recesses of the artist’s inspiration, techniques, career highlights, and forthcoming projects, illuminating the extraordinary artistic ethos that defines her.

Grimanesa Amorós, portrait by Chiara Cussatti.

Born in Lima, Peru, in 1962 and living in New York City since 1984, Amorós is known for her large-scale light sculpture installations. She began her artistic career as a painter and studied at the Miguel Gayo Art Atelier in Lima and the Art Students League of New York. In the early 2000s, she began to incorporate light into her work. She was greatly inspired by the northern lights she saw during a trip to Iceland. Fully understanding the potential of light to create immersive and transformative experiences, the artist set on a newfound path.

She has exhibited her work in major cities worldwide, including New York, London, Paris, and Beijing. Amorós’ work has been praised for its beauty, thoughtfulness, and ability to create a sense of wonder. She has been awarded numerous prizes, including the National Endowment for the Arts Visual Artist Fellowship and the Art in Embassies Program of the U.S. Amorós’s work has been exhibited in galleries and museums around the world, and her work is a testament to the power of art to transform our lives. Her light sculptures are more than just beautiful objects; they are also invitations to introspection and reflection. They challenge us to see the world … Click here to read more

The JMA Matriarchive in Resistance

Curated by Yohanna M. Roa

For the second exhibition at its new East Village venue, WhiteBox showcased “JMA Matriarchive In Resistance”, a complex interactive project curated by Yohanna M. Roa; an exhibition doubling up as the premiere worldwide activation of the Mexican-Lebanese pioneer ecofeminist architect Josefina Mena’s archive reconsidered within the contemporary paradigm of New York’s present-day artistic, cultural, environmental, and socio-political scene. This proposal constitutes the seventh chapter in the EXODUS Series celebrating émigré artists in New York City. Questioning the ‘use’ of the archive and of its memory, a select number of key documents going back to the 1967-76 period, from the Mexican-Lebanese pioneer ecofeminist architect Josefina Mena’s Matriarchive were activated by contemporary NYC based immigrant artists. The task at hand for each artist was to respond and react to Mena’s works from the present day, each availed of its own experience. As fodder, the curator-archivist Roa selected works from a network of collaborative actions Mena did in various localities, in this instance concentrated in Portugal, Mexico, Chile and London.

*Installation view of* *“The JMA MATRIARCHIVE In Resistance”*. Courtesy of WhiteBox

What do we see in an Matriarchive? It is not the inert evidence of an individual event arranged on those classic chipboard walls that serve the documentary purposes so well; the dialectic and multiple relationships between forces, bodies, and threads of different histories interweaved. At least, that is what we see in a living, open archive such as in this one. In her lecture for the opening of the exhibition, Ángeles Donoso Macaya recalled Ariella Azoulay’s challenging ideas about revolutionizing the archive: the Matriarchive as a feminist practice that defies the ways documents should be presented and made accessible to the public.

One of the artist’s … Click here to read more

Peju Alatise

Nigerian-born artist and architect Peju Alatise on her back-to-back Venice Biennales, Yoruba influences, and giving back to Africa

We recently sat down with Nigerian-born artist and architect Peju Alatise at her new Glasgow studio to find out more about her back-to-back Venice Biennales, how she juxtaposes being a contemporary architect and fine artist, and how Yoruba culture has helped her work stand out in today’s global art world.

“You need a little bit of luck, as we know arduous work isn’t everything. Do what you do because you love it, and because you can’t live without it.”

– Peju Alatise

“Alagemo” sculpture, part of “Alasiri” installation at the Arsenale of the Venice Biennale of Architecture 2021. Photo credit: Adeyemo Shokunbi

Alatise is an interdisciplinary artist, architect, and author of two novels. She started her professional career as an architect while running a private art studio. These days, she is a leading voice in contemporary art on the African continent. Her practice is relentlessly experimental and labor-intensive. She produces works across a variety of mediums, techniques, and materials, including but not limited to paintings, film, installations, sculptures. Her work is also pointedly political, often asking damning questions, and provoking reflections about the times, the state of affairs at home and abroad. The artist’s work has, in the past, explored exploitative labor practices in Nigeria, child rights with a focus on young girls, state-sanctioned violence against citizens, migration and the policies that ensure that many die at sea, seeking a better life. Alatise now produces through the lens of spirituality and Yoruba cosmology, leaning into ancient storytelling traditions and crafting alternative social imageries.

When asked about some of her favorite artists, Alatise hesitated for a moment, and eventually offered the answer that it changes from season to season. Right now, she is looking at Mexican sculptor Javier Marín and continues to be impressed Chiharu Shiota whose work she first discovered at the Venice Biennale in 2015. Marin’s … Click here to read more

Willie Cole

The Future of Art: Willie Cole, a contemporary artist creating unique work and positive change.

Willie Cole has been making innovative work with unique iconography for over half a century, but talking to him, he sounds like a friendly, smart colleague or neighbor next store. Perhaps that’s why his work is so accessible and inspirational.

The artist, who lives in Mine Hill, NJ, has been the subject of shows at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1998), Bronx Museum of the Arts (2001), and Miami Art Museum (2001). These institutions, some of the biggest in the world, along with private collectors from New York to Los Angeles, see something provocative in his work.

When Art Review City caught up with him, the artist invited us to a visit his home studio where he was finishing the works for the collective exhibition “There’s There There,” curated by renowned American artist Rashid Johnson at blue-chip gallery Hauser and Wirth’s Southampton location. This show invites visitors to reflect upon the pleasures and complex histories of the shapes, movements, and objects that permeate the everyday, and Cole’s ironing board works are clearly the stars of the show.

Installation view, ‘There’s There There’, Hauser & Wirth Southampton, 2021. © Hauser & Wirth. Courtesy Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Thomas Barratt.

The artist has spent a lifetime working to look at thing differently than most artists. He is most concerned with recycling, green energy, and living a healthy and spiritual life to live at one with Mother Earth. He spent many of his early days in a pew at Sunday School, and later studied Buddhism in high school and college, but today he says he is a “no-frills nature worshipper” which explains a lot about him as a man and as an artist. “Nature, no matter what you call it, is powerful, and it deserves to be admired … Click here to read more

Eva Petrič

Artist Q&A with Eva Petrič

“Collective Heart”, found handmade lace assemblage, (St. Stephans Cathedral, Vienna, Austria), 2016

Why did you become an artist?

I do not think it was really a choice, but more like a calling. It was something that chose me. As far back as I can remember, I have always been creating or taking part in something artistic, having to do with music, dance, or performance. Mostly, I am drawn to the quality of art as a means of translating something negative into positive, as a means of healing. And art as a language of uniting people through the language of metaphors activated by the fusion of our various senses.

How is your work different than everything out there?

I think to say that my work is different than anything else out there would be quite ignorant and too confident. Perhaps the only way I could say it is different than anything else out there is that every human, every life is a unique being and irreplicable in the sum of thier experiences, and so also my artwork when, attempted to be transcribed by someone to its last detail is impossible. We, each and every one of us has a unique life, with unique experiences that interrelate in a yet even more unique way and besides this, when we include also the perspective of the inner reality of each and every one of us then this becomes a whole new reality, non-transcribable in its entirety as we are dealing with other physical laws. One thing people have commented to me about my work is that it takes on a unique approach of combining materials and thoughts that one would not think could be combined, and that yet, the end result is luring and esthetic and thought provoking. … Click here to read more