Sicardi | Ayers | Bacino

Beyond his clear technical virtuosity in both painting and video, Rios defies the conventions of European-Western visual language by fusing painting techniques of pre-Columbian tradition and diverse American cultures. His open landscapes are not a representation of the physical territory, but an emotional and symbolic map that reflects the relationship of the being with it’s environment, with it’s history and it’s own existence. In works such as They stole the map of my town, Different time in the same frame (2023) and in the video Landlocked (2014), the pilgrim not only crosses mountains and deserts; he also crosses the limits of perception, leading us to “see ourselves differently. Hasn't that always been the challenge of painting?”

There appears to be a central paradox in Diaz’s practice. How can temporal flows and exchanges of energy be expressed in static works of art? Each work consolidates a constellation of ideas, imprinting them onto a final form (however dynamic that form may be). An exhibition extracts a moment from an artist’s practice and isolates it from the flows of time. For Díaz, who has devoted himself to the study of complexities, there is something unsatisfying in all of this. But it is precisely the impossibility of resolving this dilemma that pushes him toward constant innovation and evolution. This is the ongoing and limitless work of the studio.

Sebastián Gordín (b. 1969) is an Argentine artist well-known for his whimsical boxes, cartoonish magazine covers, and intriguing miniature maquettes of things like The Museum of Zombie Art, the Odeón movie theaters, libraries, bar scenes, etc. For Two of Us he has crafted works the size of an album cover using marquetry; i.e., inlaid work made with thin wooden laminates cut and sliced with a laser cutter. Besides drawing, Gordín performs the acts of designing, fitting, and gluing that marquetry requires. Those skills separate him from many conceptual artists who either lack a craft or chose not to use it in order to focus on ideas...

Alejandro Otero: Drawings features a grouping of Alejandro Otero's works on paper and three-dimensional works from the 1960s-1980s that demonstrate the relationship between the two media in the artist's productive process. The selected works on paper include sketches for large-format outdoor sculptures Otero designed during his time at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. Additionally on view are studies on paper the artist made for his iconic Coloritmo and Tablón series as well as a selection of realized Coloritmos.

The Question of Scale features a selection of Liliana Porter's recent assemblages that showcase the artist's visual exploration of time, space and the limits of representation. By mismatching the scale of her chosen objects and engaging human-like figurines in impossible tasks, Porter sheds light on the human condition. Moreover, the random groupings of objects and figurines in a decontextualized white pictorial space invite the viewer to question their roles and identities, and our own.

Voigt understands her artistic practice as a “performative act out of the creative action with the objective to draw spaces of potency within an endless spectrum of possibilities.” Her series of drawings entitled Hills unite the performative characteristics of the creative process to the resulting creation, using the representative formation of earthly hills to develop conceptual fields of activity. Wing-like drawing elements gently nestle into the surfaces of the hills, reminiscent of the intuitive and emotionally inspired artistic gesture that creates them. In these, Voigt establishes a performative language that, in its diversity and consistency, symptomatically corresponds to the impact of the finished work: origin and work are one and the same in terms of form.

Fanny Sanín’s rigorous, methodical, self-reflexive approach does not preclude content and expression. Instead, her use of repetition and refinement lead by ever-closer approximation to an ultimate goal of personal and spiritual revelation. It is a process that can be compared to making one’s way in the dark with eyes wide open, illuminating the world with a light from within.

Sicardi | Ayers | Bacino is pleased to present Pedro S. de Movellán: Zephyr, the gallery's second solo exhibition for contemporary artist Pedro S. de Movellán [b. 1967, USA], in our upstairs project room. This exhibition features a selection of the artist's recent kinetic sculptures. De Movellán draws upon the influences of his architect father and abstract painter mother in the creation of his sculptures, which perfectly balance both parents' influences in their precise construction and their refined and detailed, yet unpredictable, movements. Employing great technical mastery, de Movellán designs outdoor, tabletop, and hanging sculptures set into motion by wind and touch, inspired by those elements in nature which are subject to the movements of air, including the weather, birds, and trees. In an era where artists fluctuate between different media – often times rendering themselves unrecognizable from one series to the next – he has achieved an unmistakable style. Remarkably – though unintentionally – de Movellán’s biggest influence is often himself. Like many contemporary artists, he is absorbed by new technology and constantly experimenting with materials and the machines that shape them.

Sicardi | Ayers | Bacino is pleased to present Eleonore Koch: Subconscious Contemplation, the gallery's first solo exhibition for artist Eleonore Koch [1926, Germany - 2018, Brazil], in our project room. The exhibition will feature a selection of paintings on paper from the two decades Koch spent in London, between 1968-1989. This exhibition coincides with the recent publishing of a comprehensive catalog on Eleonore Koch's work by Paulo Kuczynski Escritório de Arte in São Paolo, Brazil, featuring texts by Paulo Venancio Filho, Paolo Kuczynski, and Giancarlo Hannud.

A Legacy in Color, celebrating one hundred years since Carlos Cruz-Diez's birth, is Sicardi | Ayers | Bacino’s seventh solo exhibition at the gallery. This presentation reflects the gallery’s longstanding relationship with Cruz-Diez and the numerous commissions, projects, and works realized together over the past twenty years.

Curated by Gabriela Rangel, "Touch me" features groundbreaking work by artists who have often crossed paths between disciplines and genres, refusing the compartmentalizing and hierarchical logic of fine and applied arts of modern art. The works invite us to touch with the eyes what the hand created as an open-ended source of analogical creativity made with digital tools.

Sicardi | Ayers | Bacino is pleased to announce the upcoming exhibition Mercedes Pardo: Color y Magia, our second solo exhibition featuring the work of master Mercedes Pardo [1921-2005, Venezuela], in our main gallery. This exhibition is presented in partnership with the Otero Pardo Foundation. The thirty-year breadth of the works on view in the exhibition allow one to chart Pardo's investigations into color and the development of her own organic, intuitive geometric language that differentiated her from the fixed geometry of her male counterparts. In her early serigraphs of the late 1960s, Pardo employs large blocks of color that dominate the pictorial plane. As she progressed, she experiments with increasingly layered and dynamic compositions that favor the interaction of loose geometric forms, which come to a climax in her mature work of the 1990s in which we see her most playful interplay of forms. Throughout the decades, we see her hallmark brilliance of color pairings and, often-times, subtle shifts in gradients of blues or reds that are just barely discernable to the eye.

Elias Crespin’s Tempomorphosis exhibition at Sicardi | Ayers | Bacino brings together a set of electro-kinetic mobiles made between 2013 and the present that are fascinating in their incessant ability to metamorphose in space and time. These creations, with open, almost immaterial forms, have consolidated the international reputation of the artist. Elias Crespin has had exhibitions around the world, and his work is included in the permanent collections of renowned museums, including the Louvre in Paris (where he has lived for nearly fifteen years), the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, El Museo del Barrio in New York, the Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires (MALBA) in Buenos Aires, and the Fundación de Museos Nacionales in Venezuela.

"In Shifting Grounds, nature itself becomes an expression of memory. Its communication and intertwining with cultural events modify it in such a way that nature bears witness to culture, while culture constitutes evidence of the nature it has modified and the ways it has done so. Although Shifting Grounds shares structural strategies with other series by Rodrigo Facundo, the case could be made that this work is more comprehensive. The series carries to paradise the infinite number of actions that make it a paradise but that, at the same time, unbalance it and put it at risk."

- Maria Iovino, Independent Curator

Sicardi | Ayers | Bacino, in collaboration with Cecilia de Torres Ltd., presents a selection of paintings, drawings, and sculpture by artists of the Taller Torres-García (TTG) that date from the 1920's to the early 1990s. The TTG is well-represented in the galleries of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston’s (MFAH) new Kinder building and is already known to the Houston art community. Many pieces in this exhibition are made of incised or assembled wood, carved gesso, sculpted stone, and chiseled cement mixed with epoxy. Torres-García wrote that the muse of the artist is the medium itself, leading artists to find a harmony between material and form.

Sicardi | Ayers | Bacino is pleased to announce the solo exhibition The Healing Paradox, the gallery's second solo exhibition for Sandra Monterroso [b. 1974, Guatemala], in our main gallery. The Healing Paradox features new works in textile and paper that utilize traditional methods of dyeing and weaving in reference to Monterroso's indigenous Maya Q'eqchi ancestry, as is characteristic of her practice which explores the dynamics of indigenous culture in the postcolonial era, gender issues, and other constructs of power across media. A text written by independent curator Alma Ruiz accompanies the exhibition.

Sicardi | Ayers | Bacino is pleased to announce the solo exhibition Lines here and there, the gallery's eighth exhibition featuring the work of Gego [Gertrud Goldschmidt] [1912, Germany - 1994, Venezuela], in our upstairs project room. Lines here and there features a selection of works on paper and three-dimensional wire drawings that represent Gego's decades-long exploration of the behaviors and qualities of the line that marks her distinct contribution to the development of post-war abstraction in Latin America. A text written by curator and art historian Mónica Amor accompanies the exhibition.

Melanie Smith: Remain detached is Sicardi|Ayers|Bacino’s third solo exhibition for Melanie Smith [b. 1965, England/Works in Mexico City and London]. Remain detached features a new body of work that Smith began in 2020 during the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic. Stemming from the central piece, the video Fifteen Minutes of Sublime Meditation, the new works draw on the legacies of Surrealism and abstraction and span the media of video, watercolor, painting, collage, and textile, as is characteristic of Smith's diverse practice. A text written by art historian Mara Polgovsky accompanies the exhibition.

Xul Solar: The Wondrous Realities of Xul Solar is Sicardi | Ayers | Bacino’s first solo exhibition for Xul Solar [1887 – 1963, Argentina], a unique representative of the vanguard in Latin America whose art is expressionist, surrealist, symbolist, and modernist. The Wondrous Realities of Xul Solar features a selection of watercolors that aim to consider Xul’s common ground to the wondrous worlds championed by Surrealism. Gabriela Rangel has curated the exhibition and written the accompanying text.

Sicardi | Ayers | Bacino is pleased to announce the upcoming solo exhibition Oscar Muñoz: Intentos / Attempts, the gallery's fifth solo exhibition for Oscar Muñoz [b. 1951, Colombia/Lives in Colombia]. Intentos [Attempts] features a selection of works from his recent retrospective at the Blanton Museum of Art and video works from the artist's Intentos series. This series, that prizes process equally with product, aligns itself with Muñoz's decades-long experimentation with the field of photography, applying the image-capturing process to non-traditional mediums such as charcoal and water in methods that invite the element of chance to engage with themes of memory and mortality.

Sicardi | Ayers | Bacino is pleased to announce the upcoming solo exhibition Solid Void, our first solo exhibition for new gallery artist Reynier Leyva Novo [b. 1983, Cuba/Lives in the U.S.]. This exhibition features an installation of five hundred plaster casts of the empty interiors of vessels and a coordinating wall installation comprised of fifty embossed prints made from metal casts of the plaster sculptures. One of Cuba's leading conceptual artists, Novo combines anthropological research with cutting-edge technology to examine the psychological and sociological effects of complex issues throughout history, challenge ideology and symbols of power, and question notions of an individual’s ability to affect change.

Sicardi | Ayers | Bacino is pleased to present Gustavo Díaz: Confronting Silence, the gallery's third solo exhibition for contemporary artist Gustavo Díaz [b. 1969, Argentina / Lives in USA]. The exhibition features twelve new pencil drawings and four sound works (Brownian Flights), and is accompanied by a curatorial text written by Nikki Moore, PhD.

Sicardi | Ayers | Bacino is pleased to present the first international exhibition bringing together the work of Alfredo Volpi (1896-1988, Italy/Brazil) and Eleonore Koch (1926-2018, Germany/Brazil), in partnership with Cecilia Brunson Projects, London. A text written by curator Cecilia Brunson will accompany the exhibition.

Sicardi | Ayers | Bacino is pleased to announce the installation of Carlos Cruz-Diez's (1923-2019, Venezuela/France) immersive chromatic projection, Chromointerferent Environment, in our upstairs project room. The artist's iconic chromatic environments have featured notably across Houston, from the inclusion of Cromosaturación in his landmark retrospective at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston in 2011 and the site-specific installation Spatial Chromointerference at the Buffalo Bayou Cistern from 2018-2019 to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston's commission Cromosaturación MFAH for the underground tunnel leading to their new Nancy and Rich Kinder building open to the public now.

Sicardi | Ayers | Bacino is pleased to present a group exhibition featuring artists Gabriel de la Mora, León Ferrari, Cildo Meireles, Oscar Muñoz, Marie Orensanz, Miguel Angel Ríos, Miguel Ángel Rojas, John Sparagana, and Ana Maria Tavares, and we are excited to kick off our summer programming with a return to in-person opening receptions. An essay written by Independent Curator Ximena Gama accompanies the exhibition.

Sicardi | Ayers | Bacino is pleased to present "No visual distancing please...," a solo exhibition with new work by Marco Maggi (b. 1957, Uruguay). The exhibition will be Maggi’s sixth solo show at the gallery and features nine works created over the last year. While the grip of the global pandemic requires us to maintain physical distancing from one another and move much of our interpersonal communication and experiences online, his microscopic detailing and incredibly fine incisions into the paper invite us to come closer, demanding a physical and visual closeness to absorb the intricacies of the precisely-rendered world Maggi creates.

Sicardi | Ayers | Bacino is pleased present "And Yet It Moves!," the gallery's first solo exhibition for contemporary kinetic artist Elias Crespin (b. 1965, Venezuela/Paris). The exhibition features six of his electrokinetic mobiles, suspended geometric structures whose sophisticated spatial fluidity is activated by mathematical algorithms designed by the artist, reflecting his years as an engineer and his engagement with the legacies of such Venezuelan kinetic masters as Jesús Rafael Soto and Gego. The exhibition is accompanied by a curatorial text written by Domitille d'Orgeval.

Unearthing the Mirror, a solo exhibition with new work by Gabriel de la Mora (b. 1968, Mexico), is on view through February 27, 2021. The exhibition is De la Mora's fifth solo show at the gallery and features thirteen works made of pigmented feathers of turkeys native to Mexico. This series "Neornithes" exemplifies de la Mora's sophisticated treatment of highly delicate, intricate materials and the conceptual balance he strikes between universal geometric abstraction and the meaning generated by a specific place and time. The exhibition is accompanied by a curatorial text written by Gabriela Rangel, writer, curator, and Artistic Director for MALBA (Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires) in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Sicardi | Ayers | Bacino is pleased to present our new exhibition, Nature, on view through December 19, 2020. This exhibition highlights artists Alberto Baraya, Claudio Bravo, Aldo Bonadei, Maria Fernanda Cardoso, Magdalena Fernández, Thomas Glassford, Gabriel de la Mora, Marie Orensanz, Alejandro Otero, Miguel Angel Ríos, Melanie Smith, and Ana Maria Tavares. All of these artists use close observation of nature as a starting point, whether conceptually or in terms of materials used, to create this diverse body of work dating from 1950 to today. A return to nature might be the only answer to the mounting environmental and global health crises we as a population face today. Within nature, many answers can be found as to how to live responsibly and sustainably, and many cures may be found to the illnesses that plague our population.

As Tobias Ostrander explains, "With the title of his current exhibition, Incompleteness: The Poetics of the Intangible, Díaz alludes to the “incompleteness theorem” by Kurt Gödel, originally published in 1931, in which the mathematician articulates the idea that for any law or logic to be “complete” it must contain within it its own contradiction. His thinking, based in science but more philosophical or even existential in character, implies that we are all in fact incomplete and only within our own contradictions might we approach a sense of wholeness. Díaz combines this reference with those of the “intangible,” which addresses his consistent experimentation with the limits of materiality, often pushing the structure of paper close to the point of disintegration."