Rafael Ferrer
Recodo, Puerto Rican Modernist Color Lithograph on Paper

Name: Recodo, Puerto Rican Modernist Color Lithograph on Paper
Brand: Rafael Ferrer
Price: 1200 USD
Availability: InStock

About the Item

Rafael Ferrer (b. 1933 in San Juan) is a Puerto Rican artist. He attended the Staunton Military Academy in Virginia, where he cultivated an interest in music. In 1951 and ’52, he studied at Syracuse University, then returned to Puerto Rico in 1953, resuming his education at the Universidad de Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras. He studied painting and literature with exiled Spanish Surrealist Eugenio Fernández Granell, who introduced him to the Surrealists in Europe on his first visit there in 1954. In Paris, Ferrer met André Breton and developed a close friendship with Wifredo Lam, who exerted a profound influence on the young artist and fueled his passion for Afro-Caribbean music and culture. On his return to Puerto Rico, in 1953, Ferrer continued painting and became a professional musician. In 1955 he moved to New York City, where he found work as a musician in East Harlem. Ferrer’s relationship to Puerto Rico is a significant theme in his work, his repeated migrations between the island and the cities of the Northeastern United States continually, surfacing in abstract and narrative forms. He first exhibited his art in Puerto Rico in 1961, but he felt his collaged paintings, environments, and Minimalist sculptures were misunderstood, prompting him to move, in 1966, to Philadelphia, where he began teaching at the Philadelphia College of Art. In the later 1960s, he shifted toward Conceptual and process-oriented actions and environments, in which he combined ephemeral, industrial, and natural materials. In 50 Cakes of Ice, Ferrer’s contribution to the exhibition Information at the Museum of Modern Art (1970), he installed the 300-pound blocks of the title on the bridge of the long pool in the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden and left them to melt, aligning their physical transformation with shifting states of consciousness. The mediums Ferrer has worked in include sculpture, painting, drawing, printmaking, and performance art. Ferrer taught at several universities: University of Pennsylvania, the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine, New York’s School of Visual Arts, The San Francisco Art Institute, and the University of New Mexico at Albuquerque Ferrer's success began in the late 1960’s engaging first conceptual/process art. First involving actions, such as his 3 Leaf Pieces at Castelli Warehouse and then installations, which became progressively more narrative in tone, with complicated artifacts inferring voyages. These installations took place at prominent Museums such as MoMa, The Whitney in New York, the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, Museum Of Contemporary Art of Philadelphia and Chicago. Ferrer has had solo exhibitions at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (1970); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1971); Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia (1971 and 1979); and Museum of Modern Art, New York (1974). A major traveling retrospective of his work was organized by El Museo del Barrio, New York, in 2010. Ferrer participated in in the important group exhibitions Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form, Kunsthalle Bern (1969, recreated at the Fondazione Prada, Venice, 2013); and Op Losse Schroeven, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (1969). He has also exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1969 and 1984); Museum of Modern Art, New York (1970 and 1984); Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (1971); and Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (1971 and 1972). His work was featured in the Whitney Biennial, New York, in 1972 and 1981. He has also received commissions for public art projects in the Bronx, New York (1979), Philadelphia (1982 and 2013), and Puerto Rico (2004). Ferrer is the recipient of several grants, including three from the National Endowment for the Arts (1972, 1975, and 1989). He lives and works in Long Island, New York, and Vieques, Puerto Rico.

Creator:

Rafael Ferrer (1933, Puerto Rican)

Dimensions:

Height: 40 in (101.6 cm)Width: 48 in (121.92 cm)

Medium:

Lithograph

Movement & Style:

Modern

Period:

1990-1999

Condition:

minor wear to frame. size includes frame.

Gallery Location:

Surfside, FL

Reference Number:

1stDibs: LU38212293032

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Shop All Rafael Ferrer

Rafael Ferrer

As an artist with an oeuvre as varied and colorful as his sources of inspiration, Rafael Ferrer’s work defies categorization. His long career has seen him explore the roles of figurative painter, conceptual artist and musician, and his relationship with his birthplace, Puerto Rico, has remained at the heart of each.

One of Ferrer’s classmates in the early 1950s showed him a book on modern art while he was pursuing a degree in music at Syracuse University in New York. A few years later, he returned to Puerto Rico and enrolled at Universidad de Puerto Rico, where he studied painting under Spanish Surrealist Eugenio Fernández Granell.

Ferrer visited Europe with Granell in 1954 and befriended Cuban painter Wifredo Lam as well as French writer André Breton, who is known as the leader of the Surrealist movement. Ferrer developed a deep interest in Surrealism as well as Afro-Caribbean music and culture, and the prominent artistic figures he gained as mentors and friends would have a significant impact on his work in the years that followed. Later, as Ferrer moved to New York City and across the northeastern United States, he would examine the stereotypical imagery of the tropics in popular culture and attempt to subvert it in his work.

Ferrer has worked in sculpture, printmaking, drawing and more, and his choice of material has included everything from gourds to leaves to paper bags. In the 1960s and ’70s, he made improvisational process-oriented sculpture that saw an integration of materials such as corrugated steel and ice and created narrative installations that occupied entire rooms. His bold work has regularly referenced the sprawling impacts of colonization. He painted and drew on the kind of navigational charts and maps that would have been employed by seafaring explorers, and his Dos Pinas Secas (“Two Dry Pineapples”) depicts the fruit that Christopher Columbus brought back to Europe from Guadeloupe, which was seen as a symbol of hospitality before it represented prosperity and prestige.

After seeing Alex Katz paint on the beach during the mid-’70s, Ferrer returned to painting. His vivid and colorful oil paintings of the 1980s and ’90s depict everyday scenes in the tropics, such as marketplace vendors, women shopping and fishing boats on a beach, but are also marked by examinations of societal and political issues. Ferrer’s works can be found in the collections of the Guggenheim, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and other institutions.

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