Luis Cruz Azaceta in New Orleans (and in print)

PAINTING OUT LOUD

is Luis Cruz Azaceta’s 8th exhibition with the Arthur Roger gallery in New Orleans.

Exhibition Dates: November 1 – December 20, 2014 

Gallery Location: 434 Julia Street, New Orleans, LA 70130 

Hours: Tuesday–Saturday, 10 am–5 pm

The featured recent medium- and large-scale paintings and works on paper reflect the artist’s distinctive bright-colored abstraction and figuration and continue to encourage a dialogue regarding the current political climate, social injustices, war and ecocide. 

Janet Batet describes Azaceta’s dystopian landscapes as revealing, “the imminent disintegrating character of our current surroundings.” In a recent catalogue essay, she states, “There is a sense of apprehension that underlies the landscapes of chilling beauty that form the Falling Sky series, marked by the abstract sensibility where the delicate trace from the drawing and weighed down handling of colored areas are contrasting with the sense of disaster that animates them.”

 

 Cuban-American Painter Luis Cruz Azaceta

Luis Cruz Azaceta left Cuba as a teenager in 1960 and has now been exiled from his homeland for over fifty years. After immigrating to the United States, Azaceta lived in New York and studied at The School of Visual Arts. He relocated to New Orleans in 1992. He has exhibited extensively nationally and internationally and has been awarded grants from The Pollock-Krasner Foundation, The Joan Mitchell Foundation, The Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, The National Endowment of the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts.  His work is in the permanent collection of The Houston Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Miami Art Museum, Miami; The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston; The Museum of Modern Art and The Whitney Museum of Art in New York.

 

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Luis Cruz Azaceta

By: Alejandro Anreus

Foreword by: Chon A. Noriega

A Ver: Revisioning Art History, Volume 10

University of Minnesota Press

August 2014 

Cuban American artist Luis Cruz Azaceta addresses what author Alejandro Anreus calls the “wounds and screams” of the human condition. Although Cruz Azaceta’s work is widely shown and widely collected, this is the first book-length monograph on the artist’s life and work.

Anreus traces Cruz Azaceta’s career and explores the themes that are the focus of his singular art. Anreus assesses how the Cuban diaspora, above all, has shaped the artist and how the experience of exile has found expression through starkly forceful self-portraiture in many of his works. Anreus also discusses the artist’s ongoing concern with current events. Cruz Azaceta has responded to national crises, such as the AIDS epidemic, the Oklahoma City bombing, and the devastation of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina, with graphically powerful paintings, mixed-media pieces, and installations.

Over the past four decades Cruz Azaceta has experimented with his visual vocabulary, moving from the flat, pop style of his early canvases, through neo-expressionism, and into the abstraction of current work. His commentary on humanity, however, has not changed. His art continues to remind us that there are no easy solutions to the presence of violence and cruelty, exile and dislocation, and solitude and isolation.