Lluis Lleo Announces New Exhibition in NYC
By: Christina Mancuso Apr. 12, 2017
A series of five front-and-back outdoor paintings on carved sandstone slabs from Catalonia by New York-based Spanish artist Lluis Lleó will land on Park Avenue on May 1, 2017. Morpho's Nest in the Cadmium House, a site-specific installation, will parade along the Park Avenue Malls from 52nd to 56th Streets. The 13-foot, 7,000-pound paintings are part of NYC Parks' Art in the Parks program and are presented in conjunction with the Sculpture Committee of the Fund for Park Avenue.
For Lleó, the Park Avenue paintings are an encounter between tradition and modernity, a merger of Catalan Romanesque frescoes and the work of modern American masters such as Mark Rothko, Ellsworth Kelly, and Agnes Martin. With poetic finesse, Lleó carves into the thick and dense sandstone, which he combines with ancestral fresco painting to create a tension between color and form. The title of the work references the morpho butterfly, a beautiful and fragile species found in Mexico and Central and South America.
"These stones are on the one hand a refuge and on the other a protection of fragility, delicate and fleeting," says Lleó, "They create a place where all our dreams can rest: the hope that the art of painting will not die; and the hope that the art that leaves my studio will be soaked in rainwater and let to dry in the sun, to have the spring breeze blow gently on it. The Cadmium House is that pure place one dreams to find in life. That place where memories lie and we can pay tribute to the art before us, that safe place called history where so many things are unchangeable."
With the installation, Lleó bring objects reserved for interior spaces to an exterior context, altering our perception as observers. One of the painting-sculpture hybrids is juxtaposed with the Seagram Building creating a dialogue with architect Mies van der Rohe. Like van der Rohe's maxim "structure is spiritual," Lleó's work creates transcendent and spiritual encounters by transforming harsh materials into three-dimensional paintings.
"Lleó's work is delicate and ephemeral-seeming and yet rather intensely concrete, strongly physical," said art critic Robert Hughes.
Lluis Lleó is the latest in a long list of distinguished artists to exhibit on Park Avenue. Previous exhibitors have included Ewerdt Hilgemann, Alice Aycock, Albert Paley, Rafael Barrios, Deborah Butterfield, Robert Indiana, Jun Kaneko, Will Ryman, Yoshitomo Nara, and George Rickey. To view a history of art on Park Avenue visit the NYC Parks website and the Fund for Park Avenue website.
Galería Marc Domènech (Barcelona), The Instituto Cervantes, El Institut Ramon Llull, Banc Sabadell, and Indus collaborated with Lleó on the project.
Morpho's Nest in The Cadmium House will coincide with an exhibition of Lleó's project drawings and installation models at the Instituto Cervantes in New York from May 5-9. More information atnyork.cervantes.es
About Lluis Lleó
Lluís Lleó (b. 1961, Barcelona) is a self-taught, fourth generation painter who grew up immersed in the classical history of painting from ancient times through the 20th century. His father, Joan Lleó, influenced Lluís's particular interest in fresco painting by giving Lluís early exposure to his studio work and to the spectacular medieval frescoes in museums as well as in the rural churches and chapels throughout the Spanish countryside.
Lleó's work is in important art museum collections and corporate collections including the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (Madrid), The Morgan Library (New York), The Nagoya City Art Museum (Japan), the Pérez Museum (PAMM-Miami), la Colección de la Fundación Bancaria "la Caixa," (Barcelona) and the Colección Fundación Banc Sabadell. His work is also in many private collections.
Lleó has lived and worked in New York since 1989.
About NYC Parks' Art in the Parks Program
In 2017 NYC Parks' Art in the Parks program celebrates 50 years of bringing contemporary public artworks to the city's parks, making New York City one of the world's largest open-air galleries. The agency has consistently fostered the creation and installation of temporary public art in parks throughout the five boroughs. Since 1967, NYC Parks has collaborated with arts organizations and artists to produce over 2,000 public artworks by 1,300 notable and emerging artists in over 200 parks. For more information about the program visit nyc.gov/parks/art.
About the Fund for Park Avenue
The Fund for Park Avenue relies solely on contributions from the community to plant, light and maintain the trees and flowers on the Park Avenue Malls. The Fund's Sculpture Advisory Committee was formed in 2000 to recommend artwork for temporary display on the Park Avenue Malls. For more information, please visit fundforparkavenue.org.
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