Picasso or the Sublime Irrationality of the Fortuitous
2022·Oil on canvas
Private collection
Works archive
Retrospective Exhibition
2022
Museum of Modern Art·Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic
A look back across four decades of creation. The Retrospective Exhibition at the Museo de Arte Moderno in Santo Domingo brought together representative works from the different periods of Enriquillo Amiama — from his early still lifes to his large-scale contemporary canvases.
Curatorial statement
María Brito
Curator
ENRIQUILLO AMIAMA XXI marks the 40th anniversary of Enriquillo Amiama's career and presents 73 works organized thematically. As a consummate communicator, voracious student of art history, and keen observer of current events, Enriquillo Amiama's perspective draws on both the universal and the local, which blend seamlessly in his work. In his practice, which began in 1982 with a postmodernist and inherently anti-hierarchical proposal, Amiama moves effortlessly from abstraction to still lifes, landscapes, and figuration, refusing to be confined to a single definition. Frequently incorporating different styles and materials, Amiama has created his own tropical pictorial language and fused it with a range of genres from past and present. Obsessive about composition and technique, one can find paintings in Amiama's work that combine the use of letters, words, and graphic elements with hyperrealism and abstract forms. As one of the most celebrated and prolific contemporary Dominican artists, Amiama has captured the essence of the Caribbean and merged it unreservedly with pop art. This unprecedented retrospective — including early, mid-career, and recent works — will provide a refreshing vision for old and new followers of Amiama and his work.
Picasso, Jasper Johns and me
2022·Mixed media
Private collection
Dominicana
2022·Oil on canvas
Private collection
Where Dreams Begin
2022·Oil on canvas
Guilamo Family Collection, Santo Domingo, DR
Man
2022·Oil on canvas
Private collection
Immersed in Emotion
2022·Oil on canvas
Private collection
First Day
2022·Oil on canvas
Private collection
Memories of the Old Neighborhood
1999·Oil on canvas·40 × 50 cm
Private collection
Utopias That Flew Away
2022·Mixed media
Private collection
Untitled (to be confirmed)
por confirmar·Oil on canvas
Private collection
With Ada and Matisse
2022·Oil on canvas
Private collection
Untitled (to be confirmed)
por confirmar·Oil on canvas
Private collection
Untitled (to be confirmed)
por confirmar·Oil on canvas
Private collection
Untitled (to be confirmed)
por confirmar·Oil on canvas
Private collection
Untitled (to be confirmed)
por confirmar·Oil on canvas
Private collection
Critical writing & press
“Here is the fruit within reach of our gaze. So real, lustrous, tempting that, for a fraction of a second, the illusion is complete… From the magic of an exquisite, precious minuteness that offers the object to our visual gluttony, we pass to the magic of signs, of signals… They possess a singular sensibility, exhale tenderness and provoke a gaze charged with affection… and, when there are two, they suggest the approaches of love. They have a metaphorical richness, in keeping with the visual poetry of their interpretation.”
Marianne de Tolentino
AICA
“The painting of Enriquillo Rodríguez Amiama, one of the most outstanding Dominican painters of the so-called Generation of the 80s, currently oscillates between intimism and a deepening and complexification of spatial illusionisms… the history of Dominican painting over the last two decades would be incomplete without mention of an artist who summarizes and fuses several traditions of our visual arts, in a rigorously personal, integrated body of work, in which diverse levels of language coexist in an ordered manner, from the pictogram to the abstract mark or the figurative icon.”
Laura Gil
AICA
“His contribution to contemporary painting is his freshness of line, his mastery of drawing, the subtle arrangement of color, resulting in a work that becomes attractive and evocative, sensitive and evident. An evidence that bets on figuration, within syncretic parameters, of postmodern contribution, seeking complexity from simplicity to show the dynamics of love, the instants of desire, the melancholic or euphoric moments, without resorting to direct description.”
Joan Lluís Montané
Art critic, AICA
“A pioneer of postmodern art, as well as the creator of his own style, a new pop art. Since the early 1980s, Enriquillo decided to go against the current and express himself in a highly personal way… being one of the first artists to present at a National Biennial a work that combined hyperrealism with gestural abstraction and symbolism.”
Bélgica Rodríguez
President of Honor Ad-Vitam, AICA / UNESCO