UNTITLED, ART FAIR

Untitled, ART Fair
San Francisco 2020

BOOTH B8
January 16-19, 2020

Carlos Alfonzo:
Illuminating Trajectory

LnS Gallery is pleased to announce its participation in UNTITLED, Art. San Francisco, where we will present a solo exhibition titled Carlos Alfonzo: Illuminating Trajectory. The focus survey on the artist features works from 1976-1990, including a range of paintings, works on paper, ceramic work, and sculptures. Among the selection on exhibit, Untitled (Still-Life) and Self-Portrait in L.A., were created while Alfonzo resided in California during the summer of 1983 through the spring of 1984.
In July of 1980, Alfonzo left Cuba in exile through the port of Mariel and arrived in Miami. At an early stage of his youth on the island, Alfonzo’s creative talent became apparent, an endowment he began to cultivate through formal artistic studies at the San Alejandro Academy and at the University of Havana, from 1969 to 1977. As a young man working within the Cuban system, cautiously navigating the personal and artistic repressions of post-revolutionary life, he became disenchanted with the regime.
Alfonzo made the decision to leave Cuba just 8 months before the opening of the pivotal Volumen 1 exhibition that heralded a new international direction in contemporary Cuban art, and where Alfonzo was slated to exhibit among those who would later become known as the “1980s Generation.” With hopes of finally living an open life as individual and artist, he endured a traumatic crossing via the Mariel boatlift to settle in Miami.

Within the decade following his exile, Carlos Alfonzo was awarded a Visual Artist Fellowship in Painting from the National Endowment of the Arts in Washington D.C. and a CINTAS Fellowship in the Visual Arts. His work was exhibited in solo and group shows including the exhibition Hispanic Art in the United States, which traveled to seven American institutions and the 41st Biennial Exhibition of Contemporary American Painting at the Corcoran Gallery of Art. The artist’s life was tragically claimed by AIDS-related illness at the age of 40, having just been selected as one of ‘Ten Artists to Watch in the 1990s’ by ARTnews Magazine.

Only one month after his death in 1991, a number of his paintings would be exhibited in the Whitney Biennial of Contemporary American Art in New York. Today, his work forms part of the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum, the Hirshhorn Museum, The Smithsonian American Art Museum, and numerous institutions of worldwide prestige.