Bøger af Jose Parla

Parla‿s painterly meditation on life and death in the wake of his perilous Covid encounter. The immersive, monumental paintings documented here were the first works that José Parlá created after his recovery from a life-threatening battle against Covid. The series was installed in the iconic Beaux-Arts Court at the Brooklyn Museum in 2022.

'Polarities' materialized in the wake of the pandemic when the artist felt its impacts acutely; after months spent in a hospital with COVID19, Parla's doctors weren't sure if he'd ever paint again. But, an artist to his core, he proved them wrong, and the works that came about carry a heightened sense of spirituality and empathy. More than ever, Parla sees within his practice the threads that unite us and how our actions (and passivity) become our legacy. A prominent characteristic of his work, the paintings in Polarities share a strong sense of centrum: a heart or prime mover from which bold brushstrokes and elegant lines of script emanate. These marks indicate the beginning of time, the moment from which every passing day and its events have radiated, crashed, and splintered. They are maps and topographies, micro and macro ecosystems.

Based on an exhibition at SCAD Museum of Art presents the artist¿s relationships to the rich contexts of cities he¿s visited and the experiences that shaped his practice. Grounded in Parlá¿s personal first generation Cuban American immigrant family story and an ever-evolving practice that concerns elsewhere communities and their contribution to America, Roots offers a new visual relationship with its pictorially contemplative environment to consider connections between local history, one¿s past, present, and the future; to imagine or ever create one¿s own universal truth and personal harmony now more than ever. Parlá produces a gestural landscape with juxtaposed characters, hieroglyphs and words within both paintings and sculptures that are deliberately created to serve as a carrier of meaning. The titles of his works often create playful connotations as signifiers to specific places or times, thus becoming a key element to decode the work. Parlá¿s grandfather was an aviation pioneer who flew between Key West and Mariel, Cuba on a bi-plane made of sugarcane and bamboo, which he named Caña Brava . The Cuban aviator¿s legacy continues to serve as an inspiration to the artist and his family. Parlá spent his formative years immersed in the thriving underground art scenes of Miami, while traveling often to other cities like: Beijing, Havana, Istanbul, New York, Paris, Sydney, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Tokyo, London, and San Juan, amongst many other countries where the multicultural environment and social processes deeply impacted his perception of urban space. In his practice, like his grandfather¿s flight between the U.S and Cuba in 1912, José Parlá highlights the cultural bonds between communities and the expression thereof.

JR and José Parlá's street celebration of Cuba's eldersSince 2004, the French artist JR has traveled the world flyposting colossal black-and-white portraits of ordinary citizens on the walls of city buildings. His most recent project, The Wrinkles of the City, began in Cartagena, Spain, where he photographed the city's oldest inhabitants, imagining their wrinkles as metaphors of urban texture and history. He has subsequently reprised the project in Shanghai, China and Los Angeles. In May 2012, JR collaborates with American artist José Parlá on the latest iteration of The Wrinkles of the City: a huge mural installation in Havana, undertaken for the Havana Biennale, for which JR and Parlá photographed and recorded 25 senior citizens who had lived through the Cuban revolution, creating portraits which Parlá, who is of Cuban descent, interlaced with palimpsestic calligraphic writings and paintings. Parlá's markings echo the distressed surfaces of the walls he inscribes, and offer commentary on the lives of Cuba's elders; together, JR and Parlá's murals marvelously animate a city whose walls are otherwise adorned only by images of its leaders. This volume features the portraits, short biographies of their subjects and photographs of their mural collaborations painted around Havana. A film documenting the project appears in 2013. Based in Paris, JR exhibits freely in public sites in the cities around world. His projects include Portraits of a Generation (2004-2006), Face2Face (2007) and Women Are Heroes (2008). In 2011 he was awarded the TED Prize. José Parlá studied painting at the Savannah College of Art and Design in Georgia, and the New World School of the arts in Miami, and lives and works in Brooklyn, new York. a recent project is a special commission for the Brooklyn Academy of Music. His most recent monograph is Walls, Diaries and Paintings (Hatje Cantz, 2011).