Hutchinson Modern & Contemporary is pleased to present new paintings by Manuel Aja Espil. Opening August 3rd, Worlds of Exile is his first solo exhibition in New York.
Manuel Aja Espil’s introspective practice leads him to research the history and materiality of painting. His work depicts imaginary universes that are a fusion of European and Argentine historic pictorial tradition and contemporary iconography. He blends landscape, memory, and fiction, creating familiar, while simultaneously disorienting, compositions.
Aja Espil’s intellectual practice was born of his need to create stories. Originally an aspiring filmmaker, he abandoned his initial plan and enrolled in the Artists’ Program at the Universidad Torcuato Di Tella in Buenos Aires. Aja Espil’s most recent paintings include seemingly malformed caricatures, lacking identifying features, such as gender, race, or personality, who are derived from characters of his childhood cartoons, comics, and movies. The paintings’ pictorial style borders on science fiction, as deconstructed stereotypical representations inhabit landscapes of the European romantic tradition.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue that includes a text by Gabriela Rangel, a New York–based, Venezuelan curator, critic, and writer. She was the director and chief curator of Visual Arts at Americas Society from 2004 to 2019 and the artistic director at MALBA, Buenos Aires from 2019 to 2021.
