The Armory Show

Axel Vervoordt Gallery is pleased to announce a solo project by Angel Vergara for the 2018 Armory Show in New York City. Vergara’s work includes many disciplines: performance, video, installations, drawings, paintings. Through these techniques, he explores the field of painting and its new forms, from an aesthetic and an ethical point of view. Vergara’s figurative approach is an answer to the contemporary challenges of painting, whereby he questions the meaning of the images or reinterprets them through their manipulation by the language of moving images.

Specifically created for the Armory Show, he conceived three new video-paintings, displayed with technology through LED walls. The distinctive characteristics depend on the specific context of where the images have been shot. The methodology gives these works a particular temporality owing to the constant reviewing of the forms that expand across the surface of each piece and whose images can be infinitely varied.

Originally from Spain, and currently living and working in Brussels, the artist spent an intensive period in New York to produce this new series of works with a strong reference to the city’s cultural and environmental situations. A portrait of David Hammons, the cityscape of New York City, and other historical and thematic references are investigating the traditional paradigm of painting and the relation of the artist himself within the milieu.

As part of his on-going series of live performances, the artist’s alter ego, “Straatman”, will perform during the duration of the Armory Show, each day about noon in the immediate vicinity of Piers 92 & 94.

Straatman—a nomadic, spontaneous art work—first appeared in front of the Belgian pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 1988. Ever since, he’s been popping up in various places from Antwerp to Tokyo, both announced and by surprise. With an evocative reference to executions of the first photograph and creation of the visual image, Straatman is covered by a white canvas during his happenings, on which he can draw his mental projections. The curious audience passes him by, inspecting the artist who appears as an anonymous white figure mysteriously creating his canvases.