Miguel Ángel Rojas, Corte en el ojo, 2003. Video, 11 min. Edition of 5. © Courtesy of the artist and Sicardi Gallery.
Sicardi Gallery 1506 West Alabama TX77006 Houston États-Unis
Sicardi Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition of major work by Miguel Angel Rojas for the 2014 Armory Show. Rojas is one of the most important artists to emerge from Colombia in the past 30 years. Based in Bogotá, Rojas is a conceptual and multimedia artist whose work addresses subjective experience, identity, and politics. This exhibition will include, among other works, two of Rojas’s most important series: Serie Faenza (1979) and David (2005). In each, Rojas uses images of the male body to symbolically engage with major political issues in Colombia.
Miguel Ángel Rojas, Serie Faenza: El Freddy, 1979/2006. Digital image printed from 35mm negative, 41 3/8 in. x 62 5/8 in. © Courtesy of the artist and Sicardi Gallery.
Serie Faenza is a series of photographs taken in Bogotá’s adult film theaters in the 1970s. During decades of political repression, the theaters became underground venues for homosexual encounters; Rojas’s photographs—long exposures taken without flash—are ghostly records of a community’s most intimate moments.
Rojas's 2003 video Corte en el ojo offers a poetic reflection on the Faenza photographs and the artist's experiences taking them, including an attack in which his eye was badly cut. For David, a series of 12 monumental photographs, Rojas poses his model—a Colombian soldier with an amputated leg—to replicate the stance of Michelangelo’s famous sculpture. The photographs place the human toll of Colombia’s ongoing military conflicts in tension with art history’s most idealized human form.
Miguel Ángel Rojas, Serie Faenza: Balcony, Late 70's. Vintage silver gelatin print, 3 1/2 in. x 5 in. © Courtesy of the artist and Sicardi Gallery.
Rojas’s work has been shown at MoMA, El Museo del Barrio, Bronx Museum of Art, and the Whitney, New York; the São Paulo Bienal; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and the Miami Art Museum.
For more information : http://www.sicardigallery.com.