Angel Otero

Sinking Waltz

2023
Oil paint and fabric collaged on canvas
241.3 x 241.3 x 3.8 cm / 95 x 95 x 1 1/2 in

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Angel Otero’s practice is known for employing highly innovative techniques that challenge the parameters of his materials, revealing the intrinsic qualities of paint. His works are rooted in abstract image making and engage with ideas of memory through addressing art history, as well as his own lived experience. Otero is best known for the Oil Skin works he began in 2010, an ongoing series that demonstrates the inherently transformative nature of the artist’s practice as well as his dedication to expanding the visual field of abstract expressionism. Using oil paint layered onto glass and peeled off at a partially dried state, Otero recomposes his ‘skins’ onto canvas to make entirely new images and patterns.

His more recent works have continued to explore chance-based processes and their potential to convey memory and history through materiality. The many fragments that make up his compositions become powerful meditations on past and present. The artist’s early childhood memories are brought to the forefront in his most recent series of paintings which see a return to representation combined with his hallmark style of abstraction.

In ‘Sinking Waltz’ Otero paints and collages a dreamlike scene depicting objects floating off into sea. These compositions and spaces are loosely based on personal memories associated with the domestic sphere. Probing the boundaries of figuration and abstraction, Otero’s most recent works continue to expand the possibilities of painting and materiality.

Angel Otero: In the Studio

For his first major solo exhibition with Hauser & Wirth, we spoke to Angel Otero in his Brooklyn studio. ‘Swimming Where Time Was’ fills the 5th floor of the gallery’s 22nd street location, and this new body of work marks a turning point in the artist’s career, revealing a new sensibility that has emerged over the last few years.

About the artist

Angel Otero was born in 1981 in Santurce, Puerto Rico, where he resided until moving to Chicago in 2004. He currently splits his time between New York and Puerto Rico. In 2009, Otero was included in the exhibition ‘Constellations’ at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, shortly after receiving his MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Otero’s practice is known for employing highly innovative techniques that challenge the parameters of his materials, revealing the intrinsic qualities of paint. His works are rooted in abstract image making and engage with ideas of memory through addressing art history, as well as his own lived experience.

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