09.10 — 11.01.2010
An exhibition dedicated to the recent work of Argentine artist Alfredo Prior (Buenos Aires, 1952), featuring a selection of 21 works that highlight the materiality of paint. Focusing on abstraction, in this exhibition Prior explores color and its various forms of dissolution, creating marbled surfaces that are sometimes opaque and sometimes glossy.
“Prior, the narrative painter, the conceptual artist, the self-proclaimed neo-mannerist, now shines through as more abstract than ever. The work tempers his passion for references and his ironic tendency (…) It collapses. He deliberately loses the clues that helped build his gravitational pull. And in this gesture that lightens it, it grows,”, analyzes critic Eva Grinstein in the essay in the exhibition catalog.
Various styles converge in Prior’s body of work, giving rise to the striking hallmarks of an artist who defies categorization. Prior consciously borrows from his beloved artists, yet he also arrives at these influences spontaneously, discovering upon reflection those analogies and similarities that amuse him greatly. In any case, he always celebrates the parallels with others and the paradoxes that disrupt any hypothetical stylistic uniformity within his painting.
To title the exhibition, Alfredo Prior chose to borrow a line from Andrew Marvell, an English poet and politician (1621–1678), now recognized as one of the 17th-century English Metaphysical Poets, alongside John Donne and George Herbert. Un verde pensar bajo una sombra verde is the line that closes a middle stanza of the poem El jardín and creates a tension between the natural world, represented by the idyllic image of the garden, and the spiritual world, the realm of man who wanders through it, troubled by his passions and wanderings. “With Marvell, Prior extols his pact with the mental realm, the very essence of his work. And he does so even here, in these paintings devoid of figures and narrative, these oceans free of representation in which he delights to immerse himself. Prior is abstract, neo-Mannerist, informalist, and conceptual. In these paintings without distractions or digressions, everything that is color is also thought,”, concludes Eva Grinstein.
Alfredo Prior
(Buenos Aires, 1952) A leading member of the so-called Generation of '80, he was at the forefront of a vibrant artistic movement in Argentina during that decade. Through a marvelous interplay of overlapping textures, achieved with acrylics, enamels, and glossy effects, landscapes and worlds come to life, sometimes featuring mysterious figures with fantastical touches. During the 1990s, he earned a prominent place among the younger generation of artists. In 1985, he represented Argentina at the São Paulo Biennial. His work is found in numerous museums and private collections, both nationally and internationally.
