Stux Gallery is pleased to present the recent work
of the prominent Spanish painter José
Manuel Ciria in a profoundly stirring and provocative exhibition entitled
"The Execution of the Soul". Following a tradition in
contemporary Spanish painting that includes Tàpies and Saura, the young Ciria came to attention in the early 1990s with a series of fiercely
lyrical abstract paintings that surprised artists and critics alike. Over the
past two decades, Ciria's
inventiveness has propelled him into the echelons as a leading painter of his
generation. One might say that he is responsible for revising the terms of the
medium beyond Modernist categories of expressionism and formalism in Spanish
painting into a renewed interest in selfhood. This is Ciria's first exhibition of work in the United States in which the artist has
vigorously turned this attention toward imaginary forms of
figuration.
Art critic Robert C. Morgan has written at length on the
work of Ciria, comparing Ciria's
"semi-abstract", amorphous paintings of heads and faces to the ritual of the
mask in Spanish culture, a device which disguises as much as it reveals,
obscures as much as it expresses. With Ciria's heads one gets a sense that there is as much behind the face as there
is displayed overtly; each head contains a unique narrative, concealed beneath
its gaze as it looks out at the viewer.
The underlying psychological connection between Ciria's paintings and the viewer comes to the forefront in his
"Rorschach Head Series", explicitly invoking the inkblots the Swiss psychologist
used to measure the inherent human tendency to project emotions, interpretations
and meaning onto seemingly ambiguous stimuli. Ciria's
paintings are a confrontation between the radical immediacy of faciality and the
viewer's inner compulsion to relate spontaneously to
abstraction.
Born in Manchester in 1960, Spanish painter José Manuel Ciria has exhibited
extensively throughout Europe, Latin America and North America. His highly
expressive body of work, often characterized as "figurative abstraction", has
been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions during the past three decades,
with recent appearances at the Círculo de Bellas Artes (Madrid), Christopher
Cutts Gallery (Toronto), Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art (Tel Aviv),
National Museum of Fine Arts (Buenos Aires), Cordeiros Gallery (Porto), Museum
of Contemporary Art (Santiago de Chile), Couteron Gallery (Paris), Kursaal-Cube
Gallery (San Sebastian), Museum of Modern Art (Santo Domingo) and the Pasquart
Art Center (Biel, Switzerland). He is the recipient of numerous international
prizes and scholarships such as the Extraordinary Prize Queen Sofía (Madrid,
1999), grants from the Ministry of Culture and Science of Israel (Tel Aviv,
2001), and the Gonzalo Parrado Foundation Scholarship (Madrid, 2008 and
2009).
A fully illustrated catalogue
accompanying the exhibit with a text by Robert C.
Morgan
is
available.
Stux
Gallery