Again for the First Time:
Contemporary Remakings of Abstraction
November 30–March 30, 2015
Opening: Monday, November 30, 7–10pm
Durban Segnini Gallery
3072 SW 38th Ave.
Miami, FL 33146
T +1 305 774 7740
Artists in the exhibition: Gabriel Acevedo Velarde (b. 1976, Lima, Peru), Carla Chaim (b. 1983, São Paulo, Brazil), Andre Komatsu (b. 1978, São Paulo, Brazil), Daniel Medina (b. 1978, Caracas, Venezuela), Jorge Pedro Núñez (b. 1976, Caracas, Venezuela), Nicolas Robbio (b. 1975, Mar del Plata, Argentina), and Francisco Ugarte (b. 1973, Guadalajara, Mexico).
Durban Segnini Gallery is pleased to present Again for the First Time: Contemporary Remakings of Abstraction. The first of two international group exhibitions guest-curated by Rina Carvajal, it examines the reconfiguration and contextualization of abstraction in recent artistic practices. Aiming to reassess abstract art’s critical role as aesthetic idiom, perceptual process, and research form, this project considers how abstraction’s constant re-makings keep it crucial, a strategy to think contemporary culture and to incite ongoing critical dialogues with everyday reality.
Abstraction has resurged in the practices of a younger generation of artists, and it continues to defy categorization. It remains a dynamic, open-ended, and self-reflective process that expands upon its history, generating new aesthetic and conceptual frameworks. As technological, financial, and geopolitical systems increasingly structure the world, life itself seems to become more and more abstract, and daily experience generates new ways and forms of looking and thinking about abstraction. Artists have responded to the specific conditions of the present and the particular impact that the prevalence of abstract experience now has in the world. They use the language of abstraction to translate perceptions and relationships with the social, political, and spiritual conditions of their time.
Connecting several of abstraction’s ever-changing trajectories, this exhibition brings together the work of seven contemporary artists who take divergent conceptual approaches to geometric abstract art. Their artistic concerns, strategies, and attitudes to form cut across various sociopolitical and aesthetic contexts. Their engagement with abstraction evinces revitalized and unconventional relationships to materials and processes; aware of the structure of the present, they respond to their particular insights and experiences. Created in a variety of media and formats that range from painting, sculpture, drawing, and collage to video, performance, light art, and installation, their work generates new meanings and relationships with reality. The heterogeneity and complexity of their practices continue to produce new emphases and thematics tied to both modernist histories and the always shifting contingencies of contemporary life.
A curator and critic based in Miami, Rina Carvajal recently organized exhibitions in São Paulo for the Instituto de Arte Contemporânea (IAC) and the Pinacoteca do Estado, and in Rio de Janeiro for the Instituto Moreira Salles. Previously, she was Adjunct Curator at the Miami Art Museum, Executive Director and Chief Curator of Miami Art Central, and Executive Director of the Mason Gross Art Galleries, Rutgers University. She was a co-curator of both the 2010 and 1998 Biennial de São Paulo.
