Luis Cruz Azaceta - Personal Velocity in the age of covid

DECEMBER 3, 2020 - LIVE @LORGALLERY

Lyle O. Reitzel Gallery celebrates its 25th anniversary with a spectacular solo exhibition

New Orleans-based Cuban-American master Luis Cruz Azaceta, titled "Luis Cruz Azaceta: Personal Velocity in the Age of Covid," to open Thursday, Dec 3 2020, LIVE at the gallery's instagram page @lorgallery

The exhibition is made up of a selection of 5 unpublished pieces curated by Reitzel produced by the artist during the confinement in the 2020 quarantine, along with 6 other retrospective works, which belong to the period 2007-2019, connected to each other in a natural evolution in terms of language, palette and composition within the iconography that identifies Azaceta’s universe.

In paintings such as Pandemia 2 and Pandemia 3 Azaceta addresses the "poetic window of the virus and its state of mutation; a cacophony of horror and beauty". He embraces the chaos it has caused and channels it through his own artistic hand, bringing us, in the end, a powerful exhibition both visually and philosophically.

The artist has exhibited extensively nationally and internationally and has received awards from The Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, The National Endowment for the Arts, The New York Foundation for the Arts, and The Joan Mitchell Foundation. His works belong to the Permanent Collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, N.Y., Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), N.Y., The Whitney Museum of American Art, NY, The Museum Of Fine Arts Boston, MA. The New Orleans Museum Of Art, New Orleans, Cortes, Art Collection, Puerto Rico, Rhode Island School Of Design Museum Collection, Providence, RI. San Antonio Museum Of Art, TX, Harvard Art Museum, Cambridge, MA, Museo del Barrio, New York, The Smithsonian American Museum of Art in Washington, DC, MARCO, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey, Mexico, PAMM Museum, Miami, FL.

LOR Gallery has represented Cruz Azaceta's work for over 15 years, organizing seven memorable solo exhibitions, including "Migrations, Labyrinths & Hallucinations"(2005), "No Words"(2007), "Labyrinths"(2010) "Falling Sky"(2013), "Swimming to Havana" in New York(2016) and "A Question of Color" (2018).

According to Cruz Azaceta: "In my work I always face reality, whether implementing figuration, abstraction or a combination of both, which allows me the freedom to express my ideas in relation to the situations that occur in the world, creating images to express this condition... Once the work becomes something mechanical to a certain degree in which I know what is going to happen I stop and move on to something else. I don't like to repeat myself and let the work become totally mannerist and mechanical. That's boring to me. I like to be surprised by the process, creating things I don't expect, and that's what keeps me excited and moving forward”.

Luis Cruz Azaceta, born in Havana in 1942, immigrated to the United States in 1960, settled in New York and graduated from the School of Visual Arts, beginning his 40-plus year career as an artist. Cruz Azaceta bursts into the Big Apple as one of the great pillars of Latino origin, with a proposal committed to social causes denouncing from the vanguard the violence in the streets, the drama of AIDS, the war in Iraq and oil, the dictatorships in Latin America, and being also the first to address in the migration crisis of Cuban rafters his plastic discourse.