I Heart New York: New Paintings by Juan Bolivar
30th October – 8th December 2014 – Private View Wed 29th October 6-9pm
Join us on Friday, December 5th, 7.30 pm, when Graham Crowley will be in conversation with Juan Bolivar at C&C Gallery to mark the launch of this exhibition’s publication.
In January 2013 artist Juan Bolivar travelled to New York to witness Inventing Abstraction, 1910-1925; a survey of the birth of the abstract movement staged at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).
For I Heart New York, Bolivar fuses personal encounters with New York city filtered through the imagery of paintings from this exhibition. He uses Inventing Abstraction, 1910-1925as a starting point for a new body of work made in response to this trip: iconic landmarks such as Broadway and Wall Street are reinterpreted through the schemas of Piet Mondrian and Sophie Taeuber-Arp, becoming an intimate travelog of the artist’s first visit, and quasi-pilgrimage, to New York. The exhibition will be accompanied by a publication with an introductory text by Graham Crowley.
Born in Caracas, Venezuela (1966), Juan Bolivar graduated MA in Fine Art from Goldsmiths College, University of London in 2003 receiving the Warden’s Prize. Bolivar’s paintings investigate language and cognition, and hover between abstraction and representation. His paintings reconfigure the stylistic appearance of abstraction, creating tragicomical reinterpretations of this genre which range from the sublime to the ridiculous.
Recent exhibitions include solo shows at Tim Sheward Projects, London (Law & Order, 2013), Jacobs Island Gallery, London (Bat Out of Hell, 2011), John Hansard Gallery, University of Southampton (Geometry Wars, 2008) and Lucy Mackintosh Gallery, Switzerland (Home Alone, 2008). Forthcoming exhibitions include, Castaway (Aldeburgh South Beach Look Out, October 2014) and Battlefield III (Anglia Ruskin University, December 2014). Bolivar’s work has been selected for significant exhibitions including New British Painting (John Hansard Gallery, 2004) and East International in 2007. He has received a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Award twice (2001 and 2009) and in 2014 he was selected as Prize Winner at the Nanjing International Art Exhibition, China. His work can be found in private collections in the U.K., U.S., Switzerland, Japan and South America, and public collections in the U.K., including the Government Art Collection, Ernst & Young, UAL, Goldsmiths College and University of the Arts London Collection.
