Herman Aguirre’s powerful paintings respond to Chicago shootings, Mexican drug cartel violence
Updated 5:32 AM;
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CLEVELAND, Ohio The centuries-old medium of oil paint can be incredibly expressive in the right hands. A powerful case in point is the museum-quality solo exhibition on the work of Chicago-based Mexican-American painter Herman Aguirre at Abattoir gallery in Cleveland.
Entitled “Ocultos,’ Spanish for “hidden,’ the show focuses on 14 paintings depicting impromptu memorials, mass graves, or sites of protest related to gang violence in Chicago or drug cartel killings in Mexico.
It’s grim material, to be sure. But Aguirre’s imagery is paradoxically lush, colorful, and highly emotive in ways that engage a viewer’s sympathy and attention. You can’t turn away.
At the MBAM, Eunice Bélidor breaks glass ceilings in her own way repeatingislands.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from repeatingislands.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
303 Gallery opens an exhibition of works by Dan Graham
Installation view, Dan Graham, Three Models, Three Sizes, Three Price Ranges, 303 Gallery, New York, April 17 - June 26, 2021. Courtesy 303 Gallery, New York. Photo: John Berens.
NEW YORK, NY
.- Treating the gallery as a kind of automobile showroom, Graham s installation of models allows the viewer to become both participant and spectator in perceiving the space physically and psychologically in relation to other spectators. As Graham put it in a recent interview with Antoine Catala, In my own work, walking around is important because not only do you see yourself seeing in the reflection, but you also see other people seeing each other as you see them.
Dawoud Bey,
A Young Man Resting on an Exercise Bike, Amityville, NY, 1988, inkjet print, 30 x 40 .
Over the past forty-five years, Dawoud Bey has critically reimagined photography’s social and political potential, whether through his collaborative portraits of under- and misrepresented communities or through his more recent explorations of the landscapes of northern Ohio, a terminus of the Underground Railroad. April offers three occasions to see Bey’s work: a new book, Street Portraits
(Mack), which gathers portraits of African Americans made between 1988 and 1991; the Okwui Enwezor–conceived “Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America” at the New Museum in New York, which includes Bey’s “Birmingham Project” series; and “American Project,” a major retrospective that runs from April 17 to October 3 at the Whitney Museum of American Art.