Danilo Dueñas: Sense of Mendicity
October 10 – November 22, 2013
Alejandra von Hartz
Miami, Florida, USA
“Painting has always been for me a venture into a known land. Known land is that land of layers. Yes, layers like the land. Where a layer determines what is on top and is determined by what is underneath. Only painting as a problem of stratigraphy is of interest because it is here where change will produce an awakening.
An awakening into a new problematics, the problematics of the deferring image. Image as quantum of deferral and deferral as quantum of the insolent voice of before. What better to drive painting than the before. Before understood as man before man and before God. May the young deliver; then again, may the old rise to the sky.”
—Danilo Dueñas, Berlin, 2013
Alejandra von Hartz Gallery is pleased to present the solo exhibition Sense of Mendicity by Danilo Dueñas. This is the Colombian-born, Berlin-based artist’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. It will feature a site specific installation and new works. Dueñas works with found materials, intervening and assembling them into complex constructions in which the minimal, the sculptural, the pictorial and the monumental coexist, albeit, tensely. Through a thoroughly experimental process, he creates new poetics, activated by an acute awareness and a sensitive reaction to the space that contains the work. Meaning and time are also present, as well as art history and its incidence, in permanent questioning of his own and contemporary art practices.
Danilo Dueñas was born in 1956 in Cali, Colombia. He has been a Professor at the University of Los Andes, the National University of Colombia and the Jorge Tadeo Lozano University in Bogotá since 1990. In 1995, he participated in the exhibitions Mesótica and Transatlántica, curated by Carlos Basualdo at the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design in San José de Costa Rica and the Alejandro Otero Museum of Visual Arts in Caracas, respectively. In 1999, he was the recipient of the Johnnie Walker in the Arts Prize granted by Paulo Herkenhoff, Oswaldo Sánchez and Ana Sokoloff, or his installation “Espacio Preservado II”, presented at the Luis Ángel Arango Library. In 2001, two simultaneous retrospective exhibitions of his works were held at the Museum of Modern Art in Bogotá and the Museum of Art of the National University of Colombia, curated by María Iovino.
In 2003, another retrospective exhibition was held at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Caracas curated by Carmen María Jaramillo. In 2006, he was the international guest at the Caracas FIA and in 2008 he presented “Dentro del espacio expositivo” at Periférico Caracas, curated by Jesus Fuenmayor. In 2011 he was one of the guests of the DAAD Berliner Kunstlerprogramm. His works are also represented in the Museum of Fine Arts in Caracas and the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro. He is part of the Artist Pension Trust Mexico. Recent exhibitions include “At Actium and a tribute to John McCracken,” 2011 at DAAD Galerie, Berlin, “A door repeated and the wardrobe fell,” 2012 at Galerie Thomas Schulte, Berlin and a solo presentation of his work at the abc- art berlin contemporary 2013. Danilo Dueñas lives and works in Berlin.
Click here to view Danilo Dueñas’ on Abstraction in Action.