The Amarillo Museum of Art is pleased to present the recent work of the extraordinary Spanish painter José Manuel Ciria in a profoundly stirring, provocative, and consciousness-expanding exhibition, titled Ciria-Rorschach Heads. Following a tradition in contemporary Spanish painting that includes Antoni Tàpies or Antonio Saura; the young Ciria came to attention in the early 1990s with a series of fiercely lyrical abstract paintings that surprised artists and critics alike. Over the pas two decades, Ciria's mammoth painterly inventiveness has propelled him into the echelons as a leading painter among others in his generation.
This is Ciria's first exhibition of work in a museum in the United States in which the artist has vigorously turned his attention toward the Rorschach Heads, a merging and blending of abstraction and figuration. The Heads are powerful and complex, strong in color and size. Ciria in the manner of a conductor in an orchestra uses his brushes like a baton conducting and orchestrating the surface with fierce brushstrokes filling the canvas with the colors of red, black, grey, orange and white and finally his signature spattering of paint.
Ciria invites us to create a narrative about his emotionally charged paintings. The inner meaning we bring away as viewers is often dictated by our own emotional associations that the paintings trigger. Powerful and stirring, they make us uncomfortable and yet we return again and again to confront the visual story Ciria brings to us. Ciria bares his soul to us if we are brave enough to take the time to look, to see and therefore to comprehend.
Born in Manchester in 1960, Spanish painter José Manuel Ciria has exhibited extensively in Europe, Latin America and North America. Some of his recent solo exhibitions include: the Círculo de Bellas Artes, (Madrid), Christopher Cutts Gallery, (Toronto), Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art, (Tel Aviv), National Museum of Fine Arts (Buenos Aires), Museum of Contemporary Art, (Santiago de Chile), Couteron Gallery, (Paris), Museum of Modern Art, (Santo Domingo), and the Pasquart Art Center, (Biel, Switzerland). Ciria recently had a major exhibition in New York in the Stefan Stux Gallery, February-April 2011. He has an up-coming exhibition in Valencia Spain at IVAM Instituto Valenciano de Arte Moderno, September 13, 2011.
He is the recipient of numerous international prizes and scholarships such as the Extraordinary Prize Queen Sofía, Madrid, 1999, grants from the Ministry of Culture and Science of Israel, Tel Aviv, 2001, and the Gonzalo Parrado Foundation Scholarship, Madrid, 2008 and 2009.
Amarillo Museum of Art 20.05.2011 - 31.07.2011
Website & source : AMoA
Website : City of Amarillo
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