2013 | Judge: Our favourite artist, José Parlá

We’re really excited and proud to announce José Parlá will also be judging works submitted in the BLAG 21 #Improvise #Escapism competition – where you can win the chance to have your work featured on a full page in BLAG’s 21st Birthday Edition, in the App and on show at Belgraves, A Thompson Hotel in London. First prize is a nights stay at the luxury hotel, more to be announced soon. To enter, just reserve your 21st Birthday Edition and we’ll share a detailed brief.

Learn more about José Parlá…

http://haunchofvenison.com/exhibitions/current/jos_parl_broken_language/

Language, writing and seeing are linked at several levels in José Parlá’s semiotically inflected paintings: the distinction between image and text is consistently denied—image-as-text, text-as-picture—both modes are often overlapping and present in the same painting. This glimpse makes us aware that we are not mere passive bystanders, but active participants in the world we see, that our senses produce for us moment-to-moment.

José Parlá’s paintings are composed from several distinct types of source material: the purely abstract (painterly) dabbing, gesture and layering of paint; collaged materials and detritus from the streets of the world (and that may include type or other writing and images); writing, which is easily the dominant material of these works, filling and often obscuring its contents in successive layers. Rarely is this written material actually fully legible in any of his works, usually it lies at the boundary between abstract marking and calligraphy, complicated and obfuscated by the palimpsest process he employs throughout.

Parlá’s works have appeared in major exhibitions in London, New York, Tokyo, Hong Kong and Paris, and recently in Stages for the Livestrong Foundation at Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin in Paris. Deitch Projects, New York, and OHWOW in Miami. Parlá’s solo show titled: Walls, Diaries, and Paintings at Bryce Wolkowitz in March 2011, which was accompanied by a new monograph published by Hatje Cantz.

His most recent exhibition Character Gestures, opened September 2011 in Los Angeles at the OHWOW gallery in West Hollywood. Parlá’s latest projects include a collaboration with French artist JR for the 11th Havana Biennial in Cuba entitled ” Wrinkles of the City”, a mural painting commissioned by the Brooklyn Academy of Music for the new BAM FISHER Theatre in Brooklyn, the Parlá Frères exhibition with his brother Rey Parlá at the renowned Colette in Paris, an exhibition at SCAD MUSEUM in Savannah, Georgia with fellow alumni Wendy White entitled Performing Painting, and a public mural commissioned by the Barclays Center in Downtown Brooklyn. Mr. Parlá is also part of the advisory board of No Longer Empty.

Other collections include: The British Museum, London, UK, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, US, The Concord Project, City of Toronto, Canada, and the Barclays Center, Brooklyn, New York

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, NY.

“Like Gerhard Richter, Parlá sees our art-historical notions of abstraction and abstract expressionism as having inextricably and poetically woven themselves in our contemporary understanding of the real, the authentic, the dramatic, the historic, the classic, the modern, the global, the magical, the African, the human.” - Greg Tate

“Parlá concentrates on the problems inherent in the change of context from the street to the galleries that few of the old school writers had successfully negotiated. A notable exception is, of course, SAMO, who later painted under his given name, Jean-Michel Basquiat. Parlá’s work takes off from and expands on these roots.” - Joan Waltemath for the Brooklyn Rail

“Caught very much in the moment, Parlá’s time is always transitory, a measure of echoes rather than certainties, a resonance of history where absence constitutes a more formidable presence than anything so shiny and new as the present.” - Carlo McCormick Contemplating the Storm. 2011. José Parlá © 2012 Artist Rights Society, New York, DACS, UK

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Join @BLAGgirls, @ThompsonHotels and @BelgravesLondon in celebrating #BLAG21 and http://blog.thompsonhotels.com

Photo: José with Sally by Sarah J. Edwards