Description
‘Polarities’ materialized in the wake of the pandemic when the artist felt its impacts acutely; after months spent in a hospital with COVID19, Parlá’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, Parlá 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.
José Parlá has been working for more than twenty five years to establish a style of painting that transforms the language of the street into a hybrid form of abstraction and urban realism. From the outset, Parlá has sought to interpret his experience of cities that have served as crossroads in his life, from Miami to Brooklyn, San Juan to Havana, London to Tokyo, Istanbul to Hong Kong as a central theme in his work, while purposefully engaging with the rich history of painting since the rise of abstraction in the 1950s. His work provides markers of time, and is about the accumulation of information that settles like accretions upon the surfaces of walls and streets, like the lines on the hands and faces of the people who inhabit them.
Parlá is publicly known for his permanent installations of large-scale paintings and community engagement as a co-founder of Wide Awakes. In 2015 he painted the monumental mural ONE: Union of the Senses in the lobby of One World Trade Center. Other notable mural projects include Nature of Language at the James B. Hunt Jr. Library at North Carolina State University, the mural Diary of Brooklyn at the Barclays Center, Diary of Brooklyn at the Barclays Center (2013), and Amistad América at The University of Texas at Austin (2018).
Solo institutional exhibitions of Parla's work have been organized at The Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York City, Istanbul74' a project of the Istanbul Biennial (2019); HOCA Foundation, Hong Kong (2019); Kennedy Center, Washington DC (2018); Neuberger Museum of Art, NY, NY (2018); SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, GA (2017); National YoungArts Foundation, Miami, FL (2016); The High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA (2015) Parlá's work is in several public collections including, Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM); The British Museum, London, United Kingdom; The Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY, POLA Museum of Art, Hakone, Japan; The Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase, New York; El Espacio, Miami, Florida and The National Museum of Fine Arts, Havana, Cuba.
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