Henrique Faria Fine Art presents Jungles, Mariana Bunimov’s second solo exhibition with the New York gallery. Featuring a selection of her recent large format oil on canvas paintings with subjects ranging from Olmec figurines to surreal landscapes, this exhibition demonstrates how the artist consumes and digests the visual information culled from social media, stock photography and internet image searches, transforming the banal and detached into something enigmatic and, at the same time, seemingly personal.
As Jean-François Chevrier notes in the exhibition text, “Appropriation and montage are aspects of surrealist poetics, at least when artists set their unconscious free and follow their own trail. This is what Mariana Bunimov does, with conviction.” The name of the show comes from the title of one of the seven paintings exhibited: The Jungle, inspired by Wifredo Lam’s 1942 work. Bunimov’s composition is more airy and lighter on the one hand but much more fecund on...the other. “Lam's prickly and tumultuous vegetal architecture bore no fruit. The Jungle revisited is a burlesque land of plenty,” observes Chevrier.
In all these paintings, Bunimov characteristically adds blurs and organic drips, she decontextualizes and muddles her sources. The images that come forth onto the canvas do so as when remembering a dream, some details such as the cambur (banana) remain salient while others fade away. Art Historian Jens Hoffman wrote about her work, “Objects and images filter into her life as they do to everyone else’s, but they don’t pass through as quickly, and when they do, they are utterly transformed.” This is seen in the painting of a war negotiation meeting at an immense round table about which Jean-François Chevrier writes, “The motif contradicts that of the Jungle in every way, but both belong to the repertoire of the globalized world. The human jungle is reduced to an empty circle, or to a drop seen under a microscope, a bit disheveled around the edges.”
Mariana Bunimov (Caracas, 1972) attended New York University after studying at the Escuela de Artes de la Universidad Central de Venezuela. Selected exhibitions include at Fantoche, Espacio Mercantil, Caracas (2022); La beauté sera CONVULSIVE, Galerie Michel Rein, Paris (2021); Gatherings, Henrique Faria, New York (2017); the 7th Bienal of Gwangju, South Korea (2008); Un Mundo Feliz, Periférico Caracas, Venezuela (2008); Welcome to the Dollhuse, La Pharmacie, Switzerland (2005); Composite, Ecole cantonale d’art du Valais, Switzerland (2002); Particular a Particular, Galería Luis Adelantado, Spain (2001); La Señora Lumpuy o la moral del juguete, Museo Alejandro Otero, Venezuela (2000); and the Bienal de São Paulo, Brazil (1994).
Entrada actualizada el el 23 jun de 2022
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