Galería Galou

VENEZUELAND
September 17 – October 23

Pilita García, Blue Painting, 2005

Brooklyn, August 20, 2005.- A first-of-its-kind exhibition, Venezueland features a group of emerging Venezuelan artists working in New York City in a variety of media, including painting, drawing, sculpture, installation, video, performance, new media, and sound art.

The exhibition opens in Galería Galou on Saturday, September 17th, 2005, with a reception for the artists from 6pm to 9pm, and will be on view through October 23rd, 2005. Galería Galou is located at 237 Kent Avenue, between North 1st and Grand Streets, in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Gallery hours are Friday to Sunday from 1pm to 6pm, and by appointment.

Venezueland is a virtual space where a new generation of Venezuelan artists merges and engages both in individual investigations and related creative processes. In this fertile, dynamic ground there is a steadfast pondering of memories from a country now immersed in political upheaval, and of the unstoppable flux of information generated in the urban context of New York City.

As émigrés with diverse motives and times of exile, some artists featured in Venezueland have been producing work in New York for as long as the last decade; while others have a few years in the city or are part of the recent and growing wave of Venezuela’s young, talented artists pursuing better opportunities abroad.

While these artists’ approaches to art are as vast as the various degrees of acculturation or the dynamics pertinent to a new culture, it is possible to single out a “Venezueland art work” for its wit, irony and sense of humor, or because of the attention paid to aesthetic values, even in the most conceptual explorations.

Some artists are immersed in the discourse of political and social criticism, identity and gender issues. Others are concerned with nostalgia, memory, displacement and beauty or engage in formal investigations of the art practice and explore the current states of the digital, Neo-Pop and Neo-Conceptual narratives.

The works selected for this exhibition oscillate between the allegorical and the referential, the metaphorical and the biographical, and as a group conform a statement of the type of artistic language that a new generation of Venezuelan artists are creating in New York, and the maps they are following in their journey to Venezueland.

The exhibition includes artists Mónica Brand and Francisco López, Patricia Cazorla, Valeria Cordero, Pedro Cruz-Castro, Enrique Enriquez, Pilita García, Richard Garet, Saskia Jordá, Luis Lara Malvacías, Esperanza Mayobre, Leonor Mendoza, Lucía Pizzani, Nancy Saleme and Alejandra Villasmil.

Organized by Patricia Cazorla and Alejandra Villasmil, the show pays homage to the late Venezuelan artist Elba Damast (1944-2005), who created an important body of work in New York City since the early seventies.

The Elephant Room and Other Tales of Wonder, a performance by Enrique Enriquez, will be presented on Friday, October 14th, 2005, at 7:30pm

ABOUT THE ARTISTS