lilian Garcia-Roig: Homage to Viñales
Exhibition Dates: April 26 - May 21, 2022
Reception: Thursday, April 28, 5pM - 8pm
Artist’s Talk - Saturday, April 30th, from 3PM - 5pm: Florida based artists Perri Neri and Lilian Garcia-Roig will be in conversation with JoAnne McFarland at the Painting Center talking about their relationships with identity, place, and belonging.
Cuban born American artist Lilian Garcia-Roig is an on-site painter, place is integral to both subject and process. Formally her works are as much about the materiality of the paint and the physicality of the painting process as they are about mixing and mashing the illusionist possibilities of painting with its true abstract nature. On a more personal level, her on-site, nature-themed works ultimately have been about trying to negotiate the complex propositions of sense of place and belonging, which so influence the construction of personal identity. Her creative work, like her life, has always been about reconciliation, improvisation, and hybridization.
To Garcia-Roig, who immigrated from Cuba as a child, the Cuban landscape is both alien and deeply personal to her. In 2017, she spent two weeks living and working in the Valle de Viñales in Pinar del Rio. With a deep need for these paintings to connect directly to the place of origin and to the material of the paint, Garcia-Roig found a way to use Cuba as a painting material. She used the Viñales Valley soil and hand-ground it into pigment. Homage to Viñales is work ‘of the site’, hecho con Cuba.
Homage to Viñales is making its New York City debut at The Painting Center. The exhibition is Garcia-Roig’s pictorial reconciliation between her Cuban and American identities. Some of the work in the series are mash-ups between references to Joseph Albers Homage the Square and Ana Mendieta’s earth works. The specific paint combinations reflect the color of the rural houses in the Viñales Valley. By literally superimposing Cuba on Western Bauhaus Modernism, Garcia-Roig embraces the modernist grid while busting out of it and rejecting it with the vernacular Cuban landscape. Garcia-Roig found a new culturally and pictorially hyphenated space to paint.
Lilian Garcia-Roig holds an MFA from the University of Pennsylvania (1990) and her BFA is from Southern Methodist University (1988). From 1991 to 2000 she was a tenured Associate Professor of Studio Art at the University of Texas at Austin and in 2001 was a Visiting Associate Professor at the University of California at Berkeley in the Department of Art Practice before deciding to move to Tallahassee where she became the Director of Graduate Studies in Studio Art from 2002-2008. Currently she is a professor at FSU where she serves as Chair of the Department of Art.
Major awards include a 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship, Joan Mitchell Foundation Award in Painting, Blackwell Prize in Painting Award, a Mid-America Arts Alliance/NEA Fellowship Award in Painting, State of Florida Individual Artist Fellowship Award in painting & a Kimbrough Award from the Dallas Museum of Art. Residencies include a Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture Fellowship, Vermont Studio Center Artist’s Fellowship, Hambidge Arts Center, MacDowell Milton & Sally Avery Fellowship, Joan Mitchell Center A-I-R and as a visiting artist at the Ludwig Foundation in Havana, Cuba.
On Saturday, April 30, from 3-5pm: Florida based artists Perri Neri and Lilian Garcia-Roig will be in conversation with JoAnne McFarland at The Painting Center talking about their relationships with identity, place, and belonging.
