FLEISCHMANNS Gallery 1053 will present, Colored, a solo exhibition of works by artist Dave Ortiz from June 15 to July 28, with an opening reception from 4 p.m. to 7 p.m. on Saturday, June 15. The exhibition includes 50 paintings and 16 sculptures created over the past year by Ortiz, who lives and works in Delhi and New York.
According to a press release, Colored represents Ortiz's foray into landscape painting and sculpture, as he brings his bold colors and playful feeling to media new to him. The pieces take turns sentineling and enlivening the room, providing insight into the artist’s story. He grew up in the 70s and 80s in the East New York street art scene before trading walls and cans of paint for screen printing and illuminating his growing love for the bucolic. Catskill Mountains, where he has lived for the past three years.
Today, Ortiz Edge has found a new home in the psychedelic renderings of its surroundings, the fierce tutelage of wooden soldiers, and the subliminal messages hidden in the canvases.
Ortiz often honors his Nuyorican identity and Boricua heritage through his art, showing his pride as a man of color through works like the Goya series, a Warholian take on Latin American food branding, and The Alphabet of a man of color, presented at Birdsong in 2023, a tribute to his Puerto Rican grandmother.
However, in his latest exhibition, he took a more subtle approach to thinking about race, quietly painting the red, black and green of the Black Power flag onto his canvases.
As further detailed in the release, what sets this exhibition apart from his previous exhibitions is that the viewer is privy to his process of expansion, both personal and artistic, as he incorporates more areas imaginative in his works, relying on his intuition.
In the Relay series, we see him reworking and reusing the painted canvases of a friend, Heleen Heyning. He began these works by painting blues and yellows, in a contemplative process of finding the path of calm after all the movement that preceded and surrounding his last exhibition. The canvases are imbued with an invisible painted background, from which he initiated a deductive process to simplify the picture plane into monochrome works on which he painted the horizon, retaining some elements of the original pieces in this non official.
Ortiz attended and graduated from the School of Fine Arts at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York. Her work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in New York and internationally.
His former career as a designer, including Daves Quality Meat (his own store), and collaborations with companies like Zoo York, Nike, Adidas, Vans and Converse, are echoed in Squares, a series of bold graphic acrylics on panel. wood, which showcases his contemplations as a self-proclaimed colorist.
About gallery 1053
Founded in 2021 by Mark and Maritza Birman to focus on targeted growth in the region, 1053 Gallery has joined the booming contemporary art scene in the Catskills region of upstate New York. Representing the multidisciplinary work of emerging and mid-career artists, the gallery aspires to bridge the gap between the rural and the cosmopolitan, inviting community engagement and international appeal. The gallery is directed by visual artist Monte Wilson and curated by writer Lindsay Comstock. It is open from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Friday, Saturday and Sunday and by appointment.
Call 845-254-3461 or visit 1053gallery.com for more information and to make an appointment.
