In “Enriquillo Amiama, the Dominican Republic’s star painter, celebrated with retrospective within the nation’s capital,” Osman Can Yerebakan (The Artwork Newspaper) writes that “the exhibition at Santo Domingo’s Museo de Arte Moderno chronicles the trajectory of an formidable painter.”
In his first solo exhibition in 1984, Dominican painter Enriquillo Amiama officiated his life-long marriage to his artwork. At a small gallery in Santo Domingo’s Unesco-protected neighbourhood Zona Colonial, the then 22-year-old carried out a matrimonial ceremony with an actress he employed to play the a part of not solely a muse however an embodiment of painterly dedication. One critic described it as “a occurring”, however most spectators believed they’d attended an actual wedding ceremony. Within the 38 years since, Amiama’s marriage has produced round 700 works.
Regardless of exhibiting in France, Canada and the US, Amiama is simply a family title in his residence nation. After beginning out with geometric abstractions impressed by his background in engineering, he centered on mango-filled nonetheless lifes that may finally decide his visible lexicon. With two mangoes within the foreground, every portray opens a portal to backdrops rendered as narrative potentials, some depicting distant landscapes or, sometimes, summary compositions. After seeing Mexican painter Martha Chapa’s depictions of apples, Amiama thought the fruit to symbolize the Dominican expertise needed to be tropical, but in addition sexual and vibrant.
“After a number of experiments, I settled on mango—it has many colors and a ritual to eat,” the artist says. “Pairing them means coupling—a stability, and an invite.”
The merger of meticulous hyperrealism and non-figurative experiments stemmed from a duality in Amiama’s coaching within the early Nineteen Eighties. Whereas learning at Santo Domingo’s Nationwide Faculty of Nice Arts below abstractionists who had fled Europe, the artist, who calls himself “a terminal learner”, additionally took classes from the Dominican painter Alberto Bass, who had returned after learning figuration at New York’s Arts College students League.
The pairing of tropical fruits over lushly draped Dominican flags in Amiama’s work speaks to each exoticisation by the colonial gaze and a cheeky homage to the nonetheless life symbolism in European portray. Alongside the best way, he has additionally painted Jasper Johns-influenced Pop abstractions (“I went mad”, he remembers of the primary time he noticed Johns’s work, reproduced in a e-book), mural-scale juxtapositions of dense colors and feminine portraits. Two years in the past, his journey got here full circle with a return to nonetheless lifes.
Regardless of this wealthy physique of labor, inventive trajectory and star stature in his homeland, the 60-year-old isn’t extensively identified outdoors the Dominican Republic. He has personally bought the vast majority of his work with out gallery help, cultivating relationships with collectors, all of the whereas hardly ever leaving his hometown, Santo Domingo, the place he paints round ten hours a day. This lack of visibility was the principle draw when New York-based advisor and curator Maria Brito took on the duty of organising Amiama’s recently-opened retrospective at Santo Domingo’s Museo de Arte Moderno. [. . .]
For full article, see https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2022/07/21/enriquillo-amiama-retrospective-dominican-republic
Many due to Peter Jordens for extra data: “Retrospectiva de Enriquillo Amiama en el Museo de Arte Moderno,” Diario Libre, June 29, 2022: https://www.diariolibre.com/revista/cultura/2022/06/29/enriquillo-amiama-inaugura-exposcion-en-el-mam/1917118