This installation of works by Maya Hayuk, José Parlá, Kennedy Yanko, and the late Leon Polk Smith—four artists with strong connections to Brooklyn—creates a dynamic environment through four distinct, visually immersive experiences. Animating the monumental architecture of the Museum’s Beaux-Arts Court, each artist transforms the iconic space with brilliant and subtle colors, intriguing surfaces, and wide-ranging materials.
The Museum’s considerable collection of hard-edge paintings by Smith, which sharply delineate the shaped canvases, serves as the impetus for the installation. The newly created works by the three living artists, all of whom work in Brooklyn today, similarly engage with space in innovative ways: Hayuk with her tactile, abstract modular pieces; Parlá with his large environmental paintings; and Yanko with her metal and paint sculptures.
Brooklyn Abstraction: Four Artists, Four Walls is organized by Catherine Futter, Director of Curatorial Affairs and Senior Curator, Decorative Arts, and Erika Umali, Assistant Curator, Collections, Brooklyn Museum.
Presented by Dior
Ciclos: Blooms of Mold, José Parlá
"My new body of large-scale paintings, was inspired by what the art historian Simon Schama, in describing the art of Dutch painter Rembrandt van Rijn, once called “blooms of mold,” which one encounters on decaying urban and natural landscapes.
In these compositions, I am layering and scraping paint to obscure, reveal, and abstract both text and narrative into landscapes with textured gestural skies woven with a unique code of writing to reveal a new horizon with a universal line. The abstracted text visually resembles underground mycelium formations, a complex and mysterious fungi communication network which references the interconnection between everything on land through a web of life."