Candida Alvarez’s Circle, Level, Hoop at El Museo del Barrio will get its title from a 1996 collage-painting by the artist. The understated work — a darkish blue circle adorned with white string threaded via nails — is a stark distinction to the colourful mosaics of colour that recommend stained glass in newer work. But its round kind and steady threading recommend the connectedness of every interval in her life as an artist.
Alvarez’s first large-scale museum survey spans types and media throughout almost a half century. Born in New York Metropolis to folks from Puerto Rico, the works mirror the artist’s Diasporican identification and her upbringing within the Farragut Homes, a public housing complicated in Brooklyn, with many cultural traditions her mother and father retained from Puerto Rico. Reminiscence is visualized in her artwork, nevertheless it typically hovers on the cusp of illustration. Early works on view evoke the artist as a childhood observer, seeing the world via a window in her household’s 14th-floor condominium or watching the rituals of adults. In “Bolero” (1984), a textured floor creates a dreamlike ambiance for a dancing couple rendered in delicate, jewel hues; one other dreamlike portray, “Soy (I am) Boricua” (1989), exhibits a younger lady in a window amid kaleidoscopic swirls of colour that trace at a panorama with out cohering into one.
Candida Alvarez, “Soy (I Am) Boricua” (1989), acrylic and oil on 2 wooden panels (courtesy the artist and Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago, {photograph} by Tom Van Eynde)
Although loosely chronological, the exhibition is neatly organized by theme, providing perception into the via traces that interweave seemingly disparate works. These vary from, as an example, the atmospheric chiaroscuro of the John Avenue charcoal drawings (1988) and manic scratched floor of the grisaille summary portray “Stretching, Nesting, Reaching, Feeling” (1992) to the jubilant lime-green orbs that populate “Ramon” (1996), named for her son, to the mixed-media collages of The Hybrid Sequence (1982).
All through her oeuvre, abstraction and illustration bleed into each other in the identical manner that recollections momentarily coagulate into pictures earlier than dissolving once more. A current present at Grey Gallery,Actual Monsters in Daring Colours (April 30–July 3), foregrounded this impact, pairing Alvarez’s work with these of Bob Thompson; as Thompson’s figurative works introduced out hints of figuration in Alvarez’s summary items, her work coaxed Thompson’s figures farther from illustration.
Set up view of Candida Alvarez: Circle, Level, Hoop at El Museo del Barrio. Left: “Bolero” (1984), acrylic on canvas; proper: “Girl Ironing Her Hair” (Muchacha planchándose el pelo) (1984), acrylic on paper (photograph Valentina Di Liscia/Hyperallergic)
Alvarez’s most up-to-date items, featured within the Grey Gallery present with a number of examples included on this exhibition, commerce the sense of architectural area in a lot of her earlier artwork for cartographic area — in “Partly Cloudy” and “Clear” (each 2023), irregular shapes that match collectively like puzzle items map a topography dominated by bucolic blues and greens. The works mirror her transfer in 2021 to a house studio on six acres of land in southwestern Michigan, not removed from the Lake Michigan shoreline.
Additionally they venture a way of calm after the untethered power of her multicolored Air Work (2017–19), two-sided works painted on PVC mesh and hung in freestanding aluminum frames. The items, with their unfastened washes of colour and tentative types, course of a sequence of traumatic occasions — above all, Hurricane Maria’s devastation to Puerto Rico, the place the artist has household, and the passing of her father. “Estoy Bien”(2017), outlined by delicate, dusty pinks and amorphous shapes, gives a delicate, if impermanent, respite from the chaos. The title refers to a standard chorus she heard from Puerto Ricans following the hurricane: “I’m fine.”
Although born of ache, the Air Work are buoyed by colour and lightweight; they transcend perseverance to convey the transformative energy of artwork in life. As she says in her private assertion, “I use personal knowledge to build magical dimensions.”
Candida Alvarez, “Estoy Bien” (I’m Advantageous) (2017), latex, ink, acrylic and enamel on PVC mesh with aluminum (photograph Valentina Di Liscia/Hyperallergic)
Candida Alvarez, “Mary in the Sky with Diamonds” (Mary en el cielo con diamantes) (2005), acrylic and enamel on canvas (photograph Valentina Di Liscia/Hyperallergic)
Candida Alvarez, “Wish Me Luck” (Deséame suerte) (1997/2025), steel graters, stencils, annatto seeds, and pennies (photograph Valentina Di Liscia/Hyperallergic)
Set up view of Candida Alvarez: Circle, Level, Hoop at El Museo del Barrio (photograph Valentina Di Liscia/Hyperallergic)
Candida Alvarez, “John Street Series #12” from the John Avenue Sequence (1988), charcoal on paper; Assortment of El Museo del Barrio, New York ({photograph} Matthew Sherman/courtesy El Museo del Barrio, New York)
Candida Alvarez: Circle, Level, Hoop continues at El Museo del Barrio (1230 Fifth Avenue, East Harlem, Manhattan) via August 3. The exhibition was curated by Rodrigo Moura and Zuna Maza with Alexia Arrizurieta.
