Prada Gallery is the newest space for Contemporary
and local artists in Washington, D.C.
LA REVELACIÓN
La Revelación – a solo exhibition of recent works by Venezuelan artist Antonio Ugarte opens at Prada Gallery on May 17, 30 in. x 24 in. (2007).
Antonio Ugarte, born in 1961, has had numerous solo and group exhibitions in his native Venezuela and abroad. Trained in both photography and painting, Ugarte’s works balance realism and abstraction, veracity and fantasy, and familiarity and strangeness.
Although Ugarte depicts his subjects with great realism, his paintings and photographs retain a certain mystery. The figures often appear as if through a haze, partially abstracted by heavy and humid atmosphere. In a series focusing on athletes, images of condensation on glass overlay photographs of the competitors. In these works, Ugarte successfully emphasizes the illusory and distortive qualities of water, as well as its existence as something at once familiar and strange.
In his photographic “interventions,” Ugarte superimposes multiple images and paints over them with oil color, thus abstracting and partially concealing the original subjects. Many of these works meld human forms with foliage, spider webs, doors, windshields and various other objects both organic and manmade. By drawing attention to the two-dimensionality of the photographic print by layering images and applying paint, Ugarte de-emphasizes the physicality and volume of the human forms. They become spectral and unfamiliar.
By negating the corporeality of human forms, these interventions also accentuate the psychological aspects of the subjects.
In contrast to the interventions, Ugarte’s “ninfas,” or nymphs, are essentially the embodiment of fantastical human forms; the small white clay dolls are physical representations of ethereal creatures. The tangibility of these nymphs renders them both familiar and unfamiliar. Their simplicity is pleasant and alluring, but their featurelessness is unsettling. In creating these dolls, as in his other, varied works, Ugarte maintains the tension between the corporeal and the immaterial, the real and the unreal.
Prada Gallery is open from Tuesday through Saturday from 11:00 am - 6:00pm , and Mondays by appointment only. It is located in the heart of Georgetown in Washington DC, at 1030 Wisconsin Ave., NW .