Exhibition of Puerto Rican artist Enoc Perez in Peter Blum Gallery, New York

PRART NEWS - Peter Blum is pleased to announce an exhibition of new paintings by Enoc Perez entitled One World Trade Center at 20 West 57th Street, New York. This is the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. The show runs through November 14^th.

In his newest series titled One World Trade Center, Enoc Perez explores the charged meaning of the recently completed “Freedom Tower”, an architectural icon and stand in for one of America’s darkest moments. Painted on large canvases, Perez’s architectural investigation plays out in a shimmer of varied hues and saturations. The painting’s gilded silver backgrounds distort and collapse as their emphatically painted surfaces attempt to find a decisive register. It is this slippage and shift, as the paintings attempt to align, that reflects the artist’s struggle to dissect and confront what it means to paint such a fraught architectural portrait.

Perez’s unique and obsessive process pits the mechanical against the hand made. Each painting is created in a flurry of painted layers. These layers are applied through a transfer method developed over many years in which the artist applies paint on paper and then uses the opposing side to press the paint onto the canvas with a pencil or at times his own hand. The physicality of the painting process is evident throughout as each image of the “Freedom Tower” is individually worked and layered atop the next consumed in a field of reflective silver paint. It is in the action of his painting that Perez contributes to the discourse which artists such as Andy Warhol and Christopher Wool have through the use of printmaking methods.

Enoc Perez was born in 1967 in San Juan, Puerto Rico and lives and works in New York. He received his B.F.A from Pratt Institute and received his M.F.A in Fine Art from Hunter College. Along with his upcoming exhibition at The Philip Johnson Glass House, New Canaan, Connecticut (2015), Perez recently had solo exhibitions at Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris, France (2015); Thomas Ammann Fine Arts, Zurich, Switzerland (2014) and Acquavella Galleries, New York, NY (2013). His work is included in the permanent collections of the Corcoran Art Gallery, Washington D.C.; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Hammer Museum, University of California, Los Angeles, CA; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA among others.

For additional information and photographic material please contact David Blum or Andrea Serbonich at art@peterblumgallery.com (Tel: +1 212 244 6055). Gallery hours: Tuesday-Friday, 10am-6pm; Saturday, 11am-6pm.