Rafael Barrios´ Monumental Sculptures on Park Avenue, Nueva York

Nine sculptures will be displayed in the Upper East Side of New York in a temporal exhibition that will be on view until June 30. The installation will start the night of March 2nd, just before the inauguration of the historic Armory Show (March 8-12, en Piers 12& 94).
The large scale sculptures will be installed between 51st Street (corner of the Waldorf Astoria Hotel) and 67th St. (corner of The Armory) previous to the opening of the art fair The Armory Show where the gallery Art Nouveau that represents him will be showing other new works as well.
Barrios’ diverse work includes the creation of large-scale sculptures, many destined for public spaces. He models virtual volume to monumental dimensions in these urban contexts, transforming and magnifying forms in space into a new visual experience.
"The sculptures will make the avenue more alive," commented the gallery directors Georgina Chumaceiro and Elizabeth Hazim Castillo who explained that after having their art gallery in Maracaibo, Venezuela for 20 years they opened a space in Wynwood, Miami to contribute to the international career of their represented artists.
Barrios has received numerous commissions for works to be integrated into important urban spaces such as Coca-Cola International Headquarters in New York; Philippe Stark’s Murano Grande building and the Sunny Isles Park in Miami, Florida; Fontanilla Park in Palos de la Frontera, Spain; the Universidad de los Andes, Merida, Venezuela; the headquarters of Procter & Gamble, CorpBanca, Banco Mercantil and the Instituto de Estudios Avanzados, Universidad Simon Bolivar, all in Caracas, Venezuela.
From the beginning his work has been characterized f by the alteration of the observer’s perceptive mental state. He manipulates form with the intention of dislocating our convictions about what we believe we see. Barrios creates a territory where the laws of gravity seem not to exist, one in which objects rise freely over each other; where volume appears balanced in space. In doing so, he confounds our normative beliefs about what is possible and questions our ties to that which is terrestrial.
Robert C. Morgan, renowned critic, curator, artist, writer, art historian, poet, and lecturer critic, wrote an essay about Rafael Barrios’ career for a book to be launched this spring.
Barrios had been recognized as one of the most innovative contemporary Latin American artists. Since the 1970’s he has continued to perfect his unique concept of Virtualism, a movement that he describes as “the creation of visually participative pieces by the creation of dislocating events in our perception. Volume is virtually modeled and modified in form, depending on distance, shifting with the position of the observer and the changes in light throughout the day.”
Rafael Barrios was born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and raised in Venezuela. He lives and works between Miami, Paris and Caracas. During an artistic career of almost 40 years, Barrios has participated in over one hundred solo and group exhibitions in some of the most important art centers in the United States, Europe, Latin America and the Middle East.
His distinctive works are found in prominent museum and institutional collections such, as the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto; the (Sofía Imber) Contemporary Art Museum and the Galeria de Arte Nacional, both in Caracas, Venezuela. His sculptures are also found in important private collections such as Gustavo and Patricia Cisneros, King Juan Carlos of Spain.
In this millennium, the Fund for Park Avenue Project has selected other well known artists such as Will Ryman, Robert Indiana, Manolo Valdés, Tom Otterness, Louise Nevelson, Yoshitomo Nara and Fernando Botero.