CHRISTIE'S
HISTORIAS / HISTORIES
September 25 - October 22, 2023
NEW YORK, NEW YORK
CHRISTIE'S
HISTORIAS / HISTORIES
September 25 - October 22, 2023
NEW YORK, NEW YORK
Christie’s is pleased to present Historias/Histories, a selling exhibition featuring the work of contemporary artists whose art broadly engages with the themes of memory, storytelling, community and place. Whether mining the history of art and architecture, visual and popular cultures, or political and communal narratives, their work represents a restorative process of excavation and retrieval of personal and shared experiences.
Opening at Christie’s New York on 23 September and remaining on view through 20 October, Historias/Histories includes stellar works by such leading artists as Gisela Colón, Dalton Gata, Scherezade García, Miguel Luciano, César Martínez, Yvette Mayorga, Aliza Nisenbaum, Freddy Rodríguez, and many more.
As the US art world responds to increasing calls for diversity, including greater representation of Latinx* artists across museums, institutions, and the market, this exhibition marks a historical milestone at Christie’s—the first exhibition devoted to presenting the work of Latinx artists and their ongoing contributions to the vitality of contemporary art in the US and abroad.
*The term Latinx refers to people of Latin American or Caribbean descent who live and work in the US. The use of the suffix ‘x’ is intended as a gender inclusive alternative to Latina/o.
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"The mountain form brought me a powerful source of strength and resilience, which I channeled into my early paintings and which ultimately became the fundamental form of my monoliths…" Gisela Colón
“One of my first childhood memories was watching the moon landing, which led to my lifelong fascination with astronomy,” Colón recently recalled. “As a teen, I also visited the Observatorio de Arecibo (until recently, the largest outer space telescope in the world). I studied the vastness of the cosmos and dreamt of becoming an astronaut” (quoted in E. Soto, “Gisela Colón and her Cosmic Creations,” Hispanic Executive, 27 September 2022). Colón grew up in Puerto Rico, her father a scientist who conducted air quality studies and her mother a painter, and moved to Los Angeles in the early 1990s, encountering there the legacy of California’s Light and Space movement through artists including Mary Corse, Peter Alexander, Larry Bell, and De Wain Valentine. She describes her practice as “Organic Minimalism,” nodding to the earlier Minimalists (Donald Judd, Dan Flavin) and to Latin American Op art (Carlos Cruz-Diez, Jesús Rafael Soto) as well as to Feminist predecessors like Judy Chicago. Colón has exhibited widely around the world and recently presented a work from her Parabolic Monolith series at Desert X AlUla in Saudi Arabia (2020). Her work is held in major public collections including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Pérez Art Museum Miami, and El Museo del Barrio.
“My first monolithic form emerged early in my practice in a painting titled Pinnacle (1996) that incarnated a mountain form inspired by El Yunque rainforest in Puerto Rico,” Colón recounts. “The mountain form brought me a powerful source of strength and resilience, which I channeled into my early paintings and which ultimately became the fundamental form of my monoliths… The monoliths originated from my desire to access universal connectivity between humans and to create an unspoken language of semiotic forms that we can all intuit. The monolithic form dates to prehistoric times when humans engaged the sacred realm through ancient cultural artifacts like totems and amulets. Archeological structures from early civilization—such as Stonehenge, Native Taíno ceremonial stones, and even the Giza Pyramids—all employ a similar intuitive vocabulary that invokes a mystical world beyond Earth” (ibid.).
Colón first exhibited her large-scale Parabolic Monoliths in 2017, and she continues to evolve her monumental series of iridescent carbon fiber sculptures. Many of the titles allude to elements and constellations—Cassiopeia, Iridium, Sirius Titanium—and the present work pays tribute to a constellation in the northern sky, host of the annual Perseid meteor shower and namesake of the mythological Greek warrior, son of Zeus and slayer of Medusa. Luminous and opalescent, Parabolic Monolith (Perseus)exudes an ethereal glow, its curving surface awash in crystalline swirls of orange and blue. “I gravitate toward creating singular, reductive forms because they feel atavistic and serve apotropaic purposes,” Colón explains. “Applying principles of transformation and organicism, I imbue these singular forms with pulsating life force, creating a new universal language of humanized geometries” (ibid.).
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park